‘Blog in isolation’ published 25 reasons why we should use Disqus, the hot blog commenting community and management system of 20,000 blogs, which also isn’t short of funding. I, personally, don’t think it’s so ‘hot’ and I have a number of issues with the service.

Disqus looks nice, with threaded comments, shared profiles and email updates, but it hosts and manages your comments on an external site.

1. It will slow my site down

   Remotely hosting my commenting means that for them to be viewed, I have to download them from another website and call them from a remote database. This, surely, reduces performance and increases pageload time.

2. I don’t want to entrust my comments with someone else. They could get lost.

   If Disqus were to go bankrupt, what guarntees would I have that my comments would not be lost?

3. Many things Disqus provide have already been provided elsewhere.

   Shared profiles: TypeKey. Gravatars: Gravatars. Threaded comments: This plugin. Editable comments: This plugin.

4. Data protection.

   IANAL but surely it can’t be good to subject users to another privacy policy with servers in another jurisdiction. Who would be liable for any breaches in data protection?

5. Disqus is not open source.

   There is an API, but it isn’t open source. Is it ever wise to use a system of which you cannot see the technical basis?

6. It isn’t easy to migrate to and from.

   If I wanted to leave, I would have to find a way of transferring my comments. Disqus doesn’t complement your current comment system, like coComment does, but replaces it.

7. Disqus is a company. They want to make money. They could serve ads on your sites.

   Disqus have the technical capacity to serve adverts on your site, as they could put them in comments or send them along with the comments to be displayed. You’d have to trust them.

8. It is a fad which will probably fade out, meaning more work for you as you migrate back.

   Do you remember that fantastic coComment service we all used to use? Its Alexa rank says you don’t.

Three years ago, I remember people were still frequently discussing micropayments. Micropayments are, as you may gather, very small payments which are too small to even justify costs such as credit card processing.

Several companies have tried to implement micropayments as a system for online paid content, as opposed to subscription-driven methods, but most of these ulimately fail.

In 1998, Jakob Nielsen predicted that micropayments were they way forward, as opposed to advertising or subscriptions, in his essay ‘The Case for Micropayments‘ but he obviously made a misjudgment and the advent of broadband internet saw many of his arguments (such as removing the need for advertising would speed websites up significantally, which would actually save businesses money) become significantally weeker.

In 2002, he came to the realisation that ‘we are not going to get true micropayments’ but we may get ’services that rely on user payments’ with bigger payments. His latter prediction was partially right, as the likes of online music sites successfully utilise payments of up to about £1 fairly successfully, but £1 is much bigger than what a micropayment is.

Nearly three years after Jakob’s essay, a wiser chap called Clay Shirky published ‘The Case Against Micropayments’ which stated that ‘the short answer for why micropayments fail’ was ‘users hate them’ as it leads to anxiety and hesitation. Shirky was right, as they didn’t take off and still have not taken off.

Micropayments are not economical to administer. If each page online cost 1 cent to view, how much of that cent would be spent on administration? Like any payment system, you require staff, hardware, a processing system and perhaps most important time and effort. Would a small site’s webmaster be willing to put the system into place, making his website slower as it would have to call an external site, if he were to only earn about $0.0025 per page? I think not.

Another point: do users or businesses want to pay? I wouldn’t. I can easily read 5 small web pages a minute, and I would hate to be paying 5 cents a minute or $3 an hour. I think relevant advertising is the best form of monetisation as it gives users a choice whilst still giving them access, is economic for webmasters and advertisers, and it can help the user.

Micropayments don’t work and in my opinion nor does any paid content. 99% of the time, there’s a free alternative to any paid content. I hate it, though, when I can’t get access to some content - and sometimes paying isn’t even an option - such as journals hosted on JSTOR.

One of my favourite vodcasts embarrasingly has to be Revision3’s ‘Internet Superstar’. They often bestow the great honour of internet superstardom on guests on their shows, but what exactly is an internet superstar?

Wiktionary defines a superstar as ’someone who has accumulated a vast amount of fame and wealth.’ Very few people have accumalted a vast amount of both fame and wealth online, those who have are the likes of Larry Page, but many have received quite a bit of ‘fame’ or ‘wealth’.

It’s my opinion that superstardom is when you are so famous in your field, you’re known to people widely beyond it. How many non-YouTubers will have heard of, for example, Tay Zonday? Not many, yet apparently he’s an internet superstar.

An internet superstar doesn’t yet exist. Plenty of internet celebrities, who are well-known but only in their field (the Internet), exist.

The BBC reports that ICANN are going to vote on Thursday whether or not to open up top level domains, allowing more. This would means many more suffixes than the 281 top level ones (e.g. .uk, .org, .biz, .com, .int) we currently have.

I dislike this move. Why? It would remove the nice way domains are categorised, make domains even more open to intellectual property use and to be honest and create far too many suffixes for it to be convenient to use.

The beauty of domain names to me is what they were intended to represent. .com was supposed to represent a commercial entity, .org was supposed to represent a non-profit, .co.uk to represent a commercial British entity, .int to represent an international organisation and .su to represent the Soviet Union. A key problem with domain names is that ICANN is American-dominated, which messes up this nice system. .com is informally accepted as the US suffix whilst .gov and .mil are officially American; which is surely not ‘right’ due to the international nature of the Internet.

As time went on, domain name categorisation has grown even more polluted. Is there really a need for .name, .aero or .museum? The only reason obscure domain categories like these are introduced is surely to make money. Such obscure suffixes aren’t user friendly; which is easier to remember: www.co-operative.coop or www.co-operative.com?

Some registries polluted the system even more, by advertising their domain for something which wasn’t its original purpose. A famous example of this is .tv, which the Tuvuluan registry designated to be used for television shows. Other examples of ‘domain hacks’ which pollute this system are .at, .fm and .me.

I see no purpose in opening it up. It will confuse people more and make the system more susceptible to abuse (if people register domains for the same reasons they register .info). ICANN describe opening it up as ‘the process of opening up new real estate’ and I guess it is, in a way. In a Superman Returns fashion, they are terraforming to form this real estate. By providing this real estate, there will be more trademark disputes, domain squatting but I guess there will be more money for registries and registrars, but domains themselves will be less valuable.

Toluu is a service which allows you to upload their OPML files and share them. Sharing them allows you to discover more feeds which your contacts read, in addition to seeing which feeds you have in common with other users and new feeds you can discover from them!

If you don’t know, an OPML file is essentially a list of feeds which you subscribe to. Almost all newsreaders can export your feeds to one of these.

Nils kindly gave me an invite to Toluu and I immediately proceeded to exporting my OPML file from NetNewsWire, joining Toluu and importing my OPML.

Joining Toluu in itself is a fairly nifty process. Besides typing in your invite code, there’s very little else you have to do because you have the choice of using OpenID, letting Toluu import profile data off other social sites like Twitter or of course manually inputting it! Toluu can even import your avatar off third-party websites.

Toluu itself is remarkably simple to do, you simply upload your OPML and you’re good to go. You can add friends by finding their profile, but I think it would be fantastic if like Twitter you could download your email contact list into it. You can view your friends’ feeds and there is also a Twitter-like list of recent activity, in which you can see what feeds your friends have added lately.

You can also set Toluu up so that it updates your Twitter profile each time you add a feed. Adding a feed can be done by importing another OPML feed or manually entering the feed’s URL into Toluu.

You can discover new feeds by scouring your friends’ listings, by going onto the page for a feed you read (each feed has a page) and seeing who else subscribes to it and then scouring their listings or by using the ‘matches’ feature which gives recommendations and suggested contacts (it did a fairly accurate job too, pointing me to my fellow Grand Effect member: Paris Lemon!).

The site is fairly user-friendly and doesn’t unnecessarily use Ajax. The whole site is pretty self-explanatory, which is great!

Unfortunately, I have no invites but if you’re already a member feel free to add me as a friend. I’m computer.. I have 10 invites, comment if you want one.