It’s an ongoing conversation within the IntenseDebate community: who owns your comments, blog publishers or commenters? Before we continue, we’d like to acknowledge Hank Williams’ post and Daniel Ha’s post addressing this issue. As this topic extends beyond IntenseDebate, we’ve reached out to the team at Disqus to work on creating a common groundwork for comment ownership across platforms.

Who do you think should own your comments?

Currently the debate is taking place on several IntenseDebate fronts (Get Satisfaction, blogs, emails) and it’s getting time to start making some decisions. Everything we do at IntenseDebate has you in mind, including this decision. We need your input. Of course, we realize that we’re not going to come to a unanimous decision here - “you can’t please all the people all the time” - but the goal is to get close and find a comfortable solution. So let us know your thoughts.

To get the ball rolling we want to propose three options:
1.) Blog Publisher Ownership - Comments made on a blog belong to the blog owner, giving them the ability to edit the comments as they see fit (deleting and editing comments). Blog owners have had this ability with WordPress and other platforms. The only change is that comments are now tied to the commenter in IntenseDebate (which is why there is even a debate here).

2.) Commenter Ownership - Comments cannot be edited by blog publishers. Comments can still be deleted by blog publishers - blog owners must be able to remove spam and inflammatory comments. Commenters can still access their full comment history in their IntenseDebate profiles. Commenters can take their comments with them into platforms other than the blog commented on.

3.) Shared Ownership - This is where it gets complicated and we try to reach a compromise. We’re proposing that blog publishers should have the ability to edit and delete comments as long as the original comment is accessible both on the edited comment and in the commenter’s comment history. If the blog owner edits the comment, then the commenter will receive a notification and have the ability to delete the comment. The commenter will be able to access their full comment history.

We’re sure there are specific stipulations that we’re leaving out that should be included, but we’re trying to keep this post to a reasonable length. Ideally we’d like your opinion on which option you find the most appealing. Then we can start hashing out the specifics. Please vote in the poll below and of course, comment away!

We’ve made some changes to our OpenID 2.0 support. Our OpenID integration has been live for some time now and we’ve had some excellent feedback from our users on how to improve it. So we took it back into the lab for a bit of an overhaul and it came out being much more user friendly. We’re pleased to announce that we have enhanced our OpendID 2.0 integration to support more providers. Thanks again for the great feedback!

We’ve released some great features in the past weeks - Lijit integration, Reply-By-Email, Twitter, Me.dium and Orkut integration - and we’ve got more on the way. It seems that people have taken some notice. Yesterday, Jon Fox (co-founder & CTO of IntenseDebate) and Tom Keller (CEO IntenseDebate) joined Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on Net@Night to chat about IntenseDebate. You can check out the podcast here to learn about the roots of IntenseDebate and some of the features to come.

Brad Feld also gave IntenseDebate some much appreciated blog love early this morning (5:44am). Honestly I don’t think he sleeps.

IntenseDebate was also featured in the Mashable post, “Head to Head: 4 Tools For Improving Comments On Your Blog.” Be sure to check that out as well!

It’s Wednesday and here at Intense Debate that means we rolled out some new features in last night’s release. As always, kudos to everyone here for cranking out these sweet features.

Reply-By-Email
We’re extremely pleased with the beta features we released last week. Many thanks to our beta testers for their excellent feedback! Thanks to their help we’ve rolled out Reply-By-Email. Now blog owners will be able to reply to comments made on their blogs, approve friend requests and moderate comments all via email.

While this feature can be used with all email clients, you may have to include !END at the end of your reply. If you use any of the following mail clients you do not need to enter !END at the end of your message: Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/Windows Live, Yahoo!, Blackberry, iPhone, Apple Mail, Windows Mobile. Again, for all other email clients you must include !END at the end of your reply. Please let us know which mail clients you use and we’ll work on integrating them. Also, please do not remove any of the original message text from your reply. If you’re mail client is in a language other than English, this feature might not work. Our apologies.

Twitter Integration
We’re really excited about this feature. Now when you comment using IntenseDebate, you can opt to have a notification sent via Twitter. You have full control over the wording of your notifications. For instance, my notifications read, “Commented using IntenseDebate on %POST% / %BLOG% %TINYURL%” But again, you can have the text be whatever you want. Pretty nifty.

To enable this feature, please visit your edit profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll find a list of other networks where you can enter your profile URL’s for members of the IntenseDebate community to check out. Below this you’ll find our Twitter section (screenshot below). To enable Twitter integration, enter your Twitter profile URL and select “tweet about my new comments.” Of course, you may want to use caution with this feature for your followers’ sake.

Me.dium & Orkut Integration
Again you’ve requested it, so you’ve got it! You can now include your Me.dium and orkut profile information in your IntenseDebate profile. Here’s a bit about each if you’re not familiar with these services. Be sure to check them out!

orkut - “orkut’s social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and establish new ones by reaching out to people you’ve never met before.”

Me.dium - “Me.dium is an add-on for your web browser that allows you to surf, chat and experience the web with your friends in real-time. Bump into friends and interact with the crowds just like you would in the real world.”

We’ve got a ton of awesome features coming down the line that are going to blow your mind. So stay tuned and keep commenting!

Cheers,
Michael

We’re really excited about our latest beta release that we rolled out last night. The main attraction is Reply By Email - blog owners can now reply to comments made on their blogs, approve or deny friendship requests, and moderate comments all via email. If you’re interested in getting in on this beta, please drop me a line at support@intensedebate.com.

In addition, email and IP addresses will now be included in your new comment posting email notifications for our beta testers. We’ve had numerous requests from our users to be able to privately chat with each other. This is the first step! This new functionality is just a stepping stone of some awesome features to come, so stay tuned and get in on this beta!

Kudos to Jon and Isaac on a job well done!

We’re making great strides here at Intense Debate in indexing comments! We’ve teamed up with Lijit to help bring light to what we call “the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere,” by which we mean most blog comments, which are usually not indexed by big search engines. For the first time blog readers and commenters have the ability to search through the vast number of comments made on blogs with Intense Debate.

What does this mean exactly? Glad you asked! In the past, comments have been unsearchable. You’ve invested your time and written informative essays in response to blog posts only to have them lost into the comment abyss. Finding comments was like searching for buried treasure – unless you had some sort of map where X marks the spot you couldn’t find them. Even if you had a map there was no guarantee. Well now with the first phase of our Lijit integration you can search for comments a bit easier. Consider it a far more reliable treasure map, or an awesome metal detector.

Lijit provides bloggers with an enhanced ability to let their readers search for and discover content on the Internet. If you haven’t given Lijit a try you’re missing out. Now, Intense Debate and Lijit have teamed up to put the wisdom of your comments on the map.

Stay tuned for further innovations…

In the interest of full-disclosure with the Intense Debate community, I’d like acknowledge that there have been a couple of bugs in the system. Rest assured, we’ve pushed fixes for the major ones and will have fixes for any lingering ones shortly. We appreciate your patience as we take care of these. We request that you please hold-off on submitting reports for the next few hours as we continue to knock-off the lingering bugs. However, if you are still experiencing any issues at the end of the day, please submit your reports to support@intensedebate.com. Please make your reports as detailed as possible and include any screenshots you have. This will expedite the troubleshooting process.

Thanks for your patience. Intense Debate will be good as new. I’ll keep you updated as we continue to kick some bug ass.

You may have already noticed, but just in case I thought I’d point it out. Last weekend we gave our servers a massive upgrade allowing us to continue to handle the enormous growth Intense Debate has been experiencing. This overhaul has made Intense Debate faster than ever! So if you notice that extra little step in your stride, feather in your hat or what have you, it’s probably because of our new servers!

In addition we’ve also added new editing power to Intense Debate comments. This has been one of the most requested features and we’re pretty excited to deliver it. If your fingers slip or you have a change of heart, there’s no need to fret, you can edit your comments right there immediately!

Sunday, April 20th (tonight), from 12AM-4AM MST Intense Debate will be down for scheduled maintenance. We’re putting up helpful messages on the main Intense Debate site to avoid any confusion. All your data is preserved, Intense Debate is just making a pit stop.

Thanks for your patience,
Tom, Jon, Isaac & the rest of the Intense Debate team

As a part of our most recent release, we tweaked and improved our main site. You’ll now find that it’s much easier to get around and more enjoyable overall.

We’ve also created an Add-ons page, which contains all of the Intense Debate widgets (Blog Stats, Recent Comments, My Recent comments and Top commenters) as well as instructions for Feedflare integration and a list of all your comment feeds! It’s now easier than ever to subscribe to your friends feeds, aggregate your own feed or one of your Intense Debate-enabled blogs. You also have an aggregated feed for all your blogs, and feeds that keep you up to date with comments awaiting moderation. All served on a silver plate.

How do you like the improvements? Please comment below, we have installed a great commenting system that makes it really easy.