I’ve been looking for a good way to manage the comments on my blog, and encourage new users to comment, for a long time, but haven’t found anything. IntenseDebate promises to revive commenting, so I decided to give it a try. Especially features like identity management, OpenID integration and Threaded commenting are nice. On the downside however all comments are loaded dynamically via JavaScript which means that they are not indexed by search engines and commenters will not be credited with backlinks from their comments, which is bad for pagerank. Many blogs however use the no-follow tag to tell search engines not to consider the links in comments for ranking, therefore this point is not so important.

Another point that certainly made it easy to try IntenseDebate out is that comments can be imported and exported from and to the blog, and if I’ve had enough, I can just pull my comments out of ID again. If only more companies would allow me to