SezWho raises $1 million for comment ratings
updated
The company, whose comment-ratings system you can see in the comments section of this blog, scored the capital from KPG Ventures. SezWho’s tool asks “was this comment helpful?” and rates people who comment on a scale of one-to-five.
Commentators have profiles that contain their rating and links to their past comments, which you can see by hovering over a link above the comment. The idea is that offering links to past comments can improve a blog’s incremental traffic and extract more value from previous posts.
In conjunction with this announcement, SezWho has also added new features, allowing bloggers who use its WordPress or MoveableType plug-ins to see analytics on their readers’ usage of the tool. You can see how many times profiles were viewed and how much additional traffic these views generated. There is also a new “Red Carpet” widget that displays top-rated commentators.
The company, which says it has 100,000 users, originally planned to charge bloggers for the service, but has abandoned that model. It hasn’t given up on that idea, but also intends to charge for more detailed analytics.
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About the Author, Chris Morrison
Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.