You see it on Twitter and on Facebook. You see it On Digg, on FriendFeed, etc. People are still commenting on blogs, but they’re not always choosing the blog comments section as their venue for furthering the discussion. This is why you see other buttons on content sites like the Digg button displaying the number of Diggs a story has, or the Tweetmeme button displaying the number of retweets.

These types of things offer just a bit more of an idea of how much a story is being discussed, but they’re not perfect. Nothing is. It’s hard to bring all of the engagement that stems from a piece of content back to the home base of that content itself.

Now we’re starting to see things like real-time commenting. Robert Scoble talks about this and how it could piss off blogggers…at first. Disqus has such a feature, and it essentially lets users comment and "chat" without having to reload the page, as Scoble points out. This means less page views, which could translate into less advertisers for publishers/bloggers.

There is potential for increased engagement though, which means more time spent on the site. "Overall we’ve seen the time spent on page increase about 3x," Scoble says of his Building 43 site.

"Which shows we need a new way to get paid for advertising," he continues. "No longer is refreshing the page important. That’s the old way of paying for advertising. The new way? How much engagement you have on the page."

I would suggest that we might see trends catering to a mixture of both page views and engagement levels. Engagement is very much a significant part of the equation these days, and a growing part at that. I wouldn’t shoot down the relevancy of a page view, however. Some people still like to read without talking.

“So what?” you’re probably asking.

Well, there’s a few things that Disqus does.

1. It hooks into FriendFeed. Why does that matter? Well, if you register your Disqus account (like I have) all of your comments left on blogs that use Disqus’s service, will show up on FriendFeed. Look at my FriendFeed stream. You’ll already see my Seesmic video comments that I left on some other blogs.
2. In the past hour they just turned on video comments thanks to a partnership with Seesmic. Go here to see my first video comment left on Dave Winer’s blog.
3. There’s an identity system. I don’t have to sign into comment on anyone’s blog who also has Disqus implemented. For instance, when I went over to costpernews.com and left another video comment there, I didn’t need to sign in. Plus my comments have my picture on them, which makes it less likely that someone will steal my identity.
4. Disqus comments are spam resistant. Because they use a robust identity system across blogs they can kick people off who misbehave.
5. Disqus comments are threaded.

Sam Harrelson was the first one to report the Seesmic/Disqus news on his CostPerNews blog.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is because the video commenting system is quite nice. Easy to use and easy to watch.

This is yet another piece in connecting us all together in the real time system I call “the World Wide Talk Show.”

Here’s some sites that have the Disqus/Seesmic commenting feature turned on:

http://loiclemeur.com/
http://louisgray.com/
http://shegeeks.net/
http://winextra.com/
http://avc.blogs.com/
http://howardlindzon.com/
http://scripting.com

More will almost certainly come soon. I’m looking at this technology too. I’ve been talking with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the folks who run my blog) and they are looking at a raft of things to do to make commenting better for WordPress.com users.

So, let the commenting wars begin!

If you are a blog owner, what do you think about Disqus? Like it? Recommend it to other people?

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