All that was added is highlighting. That’s easy to do. The only difference here I see is the user registration system.

If I were to implement this on my own things, I’d want access to the comments without it being stored elsewhere. Otherwise, there’s pretty much no point in setting this up for my users since it’s a complete hassle for them. Comment registration should be voluntary, not forced. And I don’t mean anonymous comments either. It should be similar to say… TypeKey. voluntary.

The whole data center thing is PR talk. I’ll give for example the fact that QWEST and AT&T went down yesterday. Tier 1. Thus, if that database happened to be on that Tier 1, but the blog wasn’t, then there’s absolutely on control.

I’m all for new services, but I personally would not give up the control I have to keep user reading easy and friendly. I’d be doing my users a disservice if so.

My two cents.

Is there some problem with keeping the conversation out in the open on our blog? Why should we send more data your direction — which we’ve all identified is the biggest problem with your service — when we can just have a conversation here where it started? You picked up on this post, so I’d imagine you folks will see the conversation continue here

XML or CSV format export not as useful as a server side plugin that does everything server side and sends a copy of the data to you. LineBuzz is the one that should be getting a copy of the data, not the site where the comment originated and was generated. If the comment is made from our site the data should reside at our site.

OpenID isn’t so much for authors, it’s for readers who will resist the idea of registering for a third party site to leave an inline comment. Why do you think sites like bugmenot are popular? Readers don’t like forced registration options. Anon comments is not the answer as that will just create more comment spam and as mentioned in my post above we don’t need to manage any more comment spam.

Your site can still get linklove by having a server side plugin. As JavaScript with third party hosting, it is dramatically less useful to sites like ours who are trying to get away from third party hosted anything. It’s a decent concept, but again, you folks should seriously consider a server side plugin option with the comments saved in a database and thus true integration with the site.

I’ll take these one at a time, starting with the easy one:

We’re not the same as JS-Kit. JS-Kit provides traditional threaded comments below a blog entry. We are the first ever to provide inline blog comments that let you highlight text and comment on a particular part of a blog entry. Some people call it web annotation. There are over 30 companies providing some sort of web annotation, but every one requires you install a plugin. So if you have 30 visitors in a day and two of them have the plugin installed, the other 28 don’t know there’s any interaction on the website. LineBuzz works cross-browser and cross-OS. Just one line of Javascript installed on a single website instead of potentially thousands of browsers requiring a plugin or bookmarklet installation.

Now the harder questions:

Re: I don’t own my own comments. Yes we store the comments on our own database. They’re backed up and are on production class servers in a data center in Virginian with multiple redundant power sources and redundant OC12 backbone networks. But that still doesn’t answer your question. So we’re considering providing an export for blog authors that lets them grab a data dump of their comments any time they want in either XML or CSV format. Does that work for you? Any suggestions on how you’d like this implemented?

Re: OpenID: We’re looking at openid as an alternative to our own registration system. We launched on Monday, just over 48 hours ago, so we have a ton of feedback from our authors and are still absorbing it all. We’re not some big bad evil corporation and we also don’t have VC’s breathing down our necks (we’re self funded) telling us to squeeze profits out of our business and take advantage of our blog authors. So we just want to do what’s in the best interests for our authors and if OpenId works best, then that’s what we’ll do. Any info on advantages/disadvantages of OpenId and personal experiences would be very helpful.

Re user registration: We implemented user registration to protect our authors. We are going to be adding a user banning feature soon and registration enables that. Again, we want what’s best for you guys, so we’re considering giving authors the option to enable anonymous comments.

Hope that answers all your questions. Please give us as much feedback as you can so we can make LineBuzz better for you. Either email Kerry Boyte, our head of product design and QA at kerry at linebuzz.com or post a comment on our blog at http://blog.linebuzz.com/ either inline or traditional.

Thanks,

Mark Maunder
LineBuzz.com Founder & CEO.
http://linebuzz.com/mark/