Squarevox

Martin Edic of social media tracking firm Technrigy points out a “commenter’s bill of rights” from Disqus. Disqus runs a third-party commenting system.

From Disqus:

Do comments need to solely belong to the blog on which it sits on? I’m not so sure it does. Comments are, in some way, the currency in which bloggers are paid for their posts. Bloggers want to encourage active discussions on their site. A way to encourage discussion is to give the participants more control of their contributions.

This blog post is largely inspired by Hank Williams’ blog post which asks, Who has comment copyright ownership? Hank makes the point that blog platforms and services such as Disqus should make this clear for both bloggers and the people who comment. I agree.

These are interesting issues, and there’s no real standard for them. They’re also important for marketers using social media, as comments are a critical part of the online conversations taking place about our businesses. From Martin’s post:

Comments comprise a very large amount of the user-generated content in social media. As Daniel points out, comments are a form of currency for bloggers, indications to both readers and search bots that this blog is a legit (since no one would bother commenting on an obvious spam blog (or ’splog’). Commenters also build reputation and, from a monitoring POV it’s really important to understand who is commenting and what they’re saying.

Adding to all of this is the plethora of commenting systems (blog native or third-party), the difficulty of following comments (something that third-party solutions like Disqus and tracking systems like Commentful and CoComment are trying to address). It’s not easy to keep up with comments. It’s not easy to monitor them. How do you handle this challenge?