It’s August and there must be extra “release mix” in the water in Boulder (in addition to the city supplied Accelerate and Endurox.) I come from a land (MIT) where “demo or die” is the motto. Since I started doing Internet-related stuff in 1994 I’ve often chanted “release early and often.” There is nothing like exposing your software to the world to get quick feedback.
Intense Debate – another one of the TechStars teams – has started to release their comment replacement system out into big bad world of blogs. David Cohen – the ringleader of TechStars – has integrated Intense Debate into his ColoradoStartups blog and describes how it works in his post Intense Debate – Exposing comment “Dark Matter.”
In my The Dark Matter of the Blogosphere post I discussed the lameness of the blog comment infrastructure. Intense Debate is addressing “the future” of this with a complete blog replacement system that plays nice with existing blog comments (one of my other investments – BigSwerve – is addressing “the past.”) Right now Intense Debate supports WordPress.org, Blogger, and Typepad; Movable Type is coming soon (and – once it’s ready – you’ll get to play around with it on this blog.) They are in a controlled beta to insure that they are 100% stable with each blog platform – if you are interested in getting on the list to experiment with their stuff, sign up for the closed beta.
Last week I had an afternoon meeting with the founders of several companies, including Intense Debate, BigSwerve, Lijit, and NewsGator – each who are working on different parts of the Dark Matter problem. I’ve also been talking to a handful of other folks that are going after various parts of this problem. I’m starting to get my mind around interesting ways to address the extremely large number of comments out there in the wild.