Disqus

Daniel Ha - Co-founder of Disqus

1. How is Disqus doing? It seems a lot of the online chatter about Disqus has died down since Fred Wilson helped provide funding and major bloggers like Dave Winer switched to Disqus. Is that indicative of the adoption you’re seeing?

   Disqus is doing pretty well. We have a great community of commenters and sites using Disqus which, as of this month, is growing at its fastest rate ever. We recently added two people to the team and have been working on a few new things, including an imminent major release. I pay a lot of attention to the online chatter you mention, and I’ve actually been seeing more chatter about blog discussion and comment systems.

   When we first launched the service, there was a lot of blog posts and buzz because we were doing something a little new. Fortunately, the premise we’ve helped introduce has become better recognized (with assistance from the handful of competing services to Disqus) and the overall novelty has worn a bit. Of course, we’ve also been a little quiet in the last month as we focused on improving Disqus. We’ll be making more noise very soon.

2. What technology did you use to write Disqus? Why did you choose it? How has it scaled?

   Disqus uses Django, a Python web framework. We chose Django for a few reasons: a) it allowed us to rapidly prototype and develop; b) we are big fans of Python; c) it’s powerful and easily extensible; d) there was a growing, passionate community behind it.

   Disqus isn’t a destination site, but rather a service that runs across so many different websites. We ran into challenges, both typical and particularly interesting ones. There was a long period during the summer where we devoted much our time and energy into rewriting parts of core Disqus so that we are able to scale much easier moving forward. We’re very confident of our scalability and performance today.

3. What has been the largest hurdle for Disqus so far? Adoption? Finances? Scalability?

   Our largest hurdle was communicating our goals for the service to potential users. We had to package up our thoughts and philosophy around building Disqus and offer something tangibly beneficial to people discovering Disqus for the first time.

4. What has been your biggest personal learning experience from starting and working on Disqus?

   It’s hard to say. I’ve learned so much about the many aspects that Disqus has gone on to touch upon: startups, web communities, scaling web applications, user experience, embracing feedback, the importance of customer feedback, the dynamics of new and current media… many many things.

5. What new online technology has you most excited these days? Why?

   I love new services that takes older mediums, such as print media and television, and breathes new life into them without radically changing our existing behavior. I feel that Disqus is in a good position to achieve this if we continue to innovate in this area.

• Buzz Out Loud: This daily podcast is the best source for the days tech news. It’s techmeme.com in podcast format.
• This Week in Tech (TWIT): I used to watch the ScreenSavers religiously on TechTV. Leo is great and I love listening to John Dvorak and Jason Calacanis.
• Diggnation: Again, Kevin Rose is a former ScreenSaver. This podcast has real comedic value as well. However, since Digg has become more mainstream, so has the stories on Diggnation. Long gone are the top stories only being tech related.
• The Disciplined Investor: I first heard Andrew Horowitz on TWIT. I’ve been subscribed for a few episodes now. I do wish Andrew would explain more of the terms, but it’s good to hear an opinion opposite of that you hear on mainstream media.
• You Suck at Photoshop: I’m a sucker for Photoshop magic. This video podcast definitely makes me feel like I suck at photoshop.
• Tiki Bar TV: One of the best video podcasts out there. I only wish they produced more episodes more regularly.

I’ve been trying to find some online marketing podcasts, but haven’t found any I’m in love with. I’ve also jumped into niche podcasts from time to time including: Craft Beer Radio, MuggleCast, Raider Nation Podcast, and various others.

So, what does your podcast playlist consist of? Is it tech or some other content. Let me know what I’m missing.

So today, I decided to modify it slightly to fit my desire for a simple design. The Prologue theme was developed for a multi-author environment. Since I’m the only author on this blog, I made a few tweaks.

I added my latest tweet to the top right corner. I added post titles to all the pages. By default, Prologue doesn’t use titles. Lastly, I added my friend feed stream to the sidebar. I think it looks nice. Thoughts?

I do wish I had the option to use the WYSIWYG editor on the post box that displays on the main index page when I’m logged in.

Update: After reading this post about adding the WYSIWYG editor to prologue, I’m now rocking TinyMCE at the top when logged in.

Yesterday, Google made the next evolutionary change with searchWiki. searchWiki is new functionality that allows users to promote or remove search engine results from Google. While it’s being touted as a way to customize your own search results, there’s more to it then that. If Google decides to implement “promoted pages” as a factor into their already powerful algorithm, search engine optimization will change as we know it. The idea here: citation plus recommendation equals top listing.

How does it work?

Let’s explore how this would work. If I search for fly fishing equipment today (yes, I’m avoiding the running shoes example), I get results of an assortment of online fishing retailers. If I them promote Cabella’s to the top of this list becase I love their site, their checkout process and their customer service, awesome. The next time I search for fly fishing equipment, Cabella’s is listed at the top. But let’s say a very tiny tiny fraction of Google user’s do this. Um, I don’t know, like 20,000 people – I would consider this a micro fraction – Google can then look at that data and in effect say, Cabella’s is a very authoritative site linked to by many other sites and users seem to really like it, let’s place it number 1.

Keyword search results will in essence become top rated sites. The rating will be based off incoming links and user recommendations. This will prevent SEO professionals from being able to game the system. Instead, their sites will have to first rank high and then deliver on user experience. User’s aren’t going to promote sites that don’t fullfill on their respective promises and if the site’s really bad, they are liable to remove it all together.

Gaming the System

This new style of ranking would make the barrier to entry very high for new sites. It’s already high if you’re a new site trying to take market share based off competitive keywords. Usually involving a significant link building process that often borders on unethical. Now, you’d have to have a combination of link building and promoting. As anyone who’s into Digg.com can tell you, gaming promotion is entirely possible and is done regularly. However, the difference is Google’s shear numbers. Maybe, in the example above, they raise the number from 20,000 promotions to 200,000 promotions. A much tougher number to game. For very popular and competitive keywords, the number moves up to 2,000,000 promotions. Impossible to game.

When will it happen?

I’m confident that Google will sit back for awhile and be content gathering promotions and removals. This data will be initially be used for nothing more that personalizing search engine results for any logged in user. If it catches on, they might slowly begin to integrate it into the algorithm. They can easily start with those search terms that have the largest number of promotions and removals. If a search term doesn’t have any user sourced recommendations, they gracefully fall back on to their current algorithm. You know the one that’s gained them 74% of the market share in the US. But if it does catch on, be sure that this will be a historic game changer that will keep Google well ahead of it’s competitors for a long time to come.

Upon clicking on the up arrow, I got the following pop-up window:

After I clicked continue, the arrow was then shown green.

Update: Apparently, Google is calling this searchWiki. Here is there official post on the subject including an introductory video. Read why this is going to be a huge evolution to search engine results.

YouTube – 5 Friends Uncensored.

• 43f Program Note: The Week our Gears Shift
• Four Years
• Time, Attention, and Creative Work

Also, in related reading, check out why Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments on his blog. It’s made me reconsider the whole idea.

Adding a photo is pretty easy, although I can’t see it in the preview. You can choose a photo from your library or take one fresh.

For mobile blogging, I think email to Flickr to wordpress works fine. I guess this would come in handy if you wanted to bypass Flickr.