Today's news on SezWho's acquisition of Tejit stirred up, appropriately, a number of conversations around the Web regarding blog commenting platforms, and comparisons between SezWho and Disqus were common. But while some tried to paint the two products as competition, Disqus founder Daniel Ha publicly looked to open talks with SezWho, while, elsewhere, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit confirmed that he's reached out to the Disqus team to make conversations on the popular social aggregation site two-way, which could mark yet another important name on Disqus' growing list of successful partnerships.

In fact, I didn't have to look far to spot Daniel's conversation with Jitendra Gupta, the CEO of SezWho, for it happened in the comments section of my coverage this morning.

See: SezWho CEO Jitendra Gupta Speaks on Tejit Buy: Comments

Although in coverage of the announcement both here and elsewhere, Gupta had made comments about Disqus' removing blog comments from the original site, and centralizing them on their own, rather than declare war against SezWho, Daniel instead played peacemaker, writing, "Congrats on the acquisition. Sounds like you guys are doing something a bit different than us. We should talk about doing something about this fragmentation. Game?"

This led to Jitendra's offering to grab drinks with Daniel, and the two now look like they're indeed game to set up a conversation which could lead to a great deal of collaboration between the two players.

Meanwhile, as FriendFeed continues its rapid growth, gaining significant mindshare, in part due to excitement displayed by top bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Fred Wilson, Loic LeMeur, Thomas Hawk and Steve Rubel, the fact that comments on FriendFeed aren't also migrating to the author's blog posts hasn't sat well with everyone. It's uncommon that a few days can go by without one blogger or another begging to have the comments on FriendFeed come back to their site, whether through a blog plug-in or some other way. While I believe a community should be able to hold parallel conversations, not all agree.

Buchheit, in response to a post from Wilson titled Web Discussions: Leaving The Instigator Out, said that he had reached out to Disqus to solve this commenting silo.

"I've been in contact with the Disqus team, and I hope to add the option to copy comments though to Disqus in the not too distant future," Buchheit wrote, also adding, as I believe, "Many of my (FriendFeed) comments aren't relevant in the original context... In many cases, (FriendFeed) is enabling new types of comments that would not (or should not) have occurred in the past."

By forging a partnership with Disqus, FriendFeed users could comment on FriendFeed items, and have comments also post to the originating blog, just as other services, including Fav.or.it and Plaxo have implemented. Combined with the recent introduction of video comments from Seesmic, and the above conversation with SezWho, you can see Disqus' strategy develop, to be open to partnerships of all kinds, establishing their service as one of the most versatile, almost default, in the nascent comment replacement market. It's very smart, and one that will get them a lot of good will in a blogosphere ready to accept new, innovative, approaches to communication.

This morning, SezWho, a content rating and reputation management service, announced the acquisition of Tejit, a small company providing semantic analysis of user generated content through its discovery engine. The purchase is intended for SezWho to deliver even more precise reputation scores for contributors in an online conversation, honed by analysis of their activity throughout the Web, be it through blogs, forums or other social media.

In advance of the announcement, I had the opportunity to talk with SezWho's CEO, Jitendra Gupta, in a call Monday night, outlining the goals of the service, and how the combined offering will differentiate itself from services like Disqus. In our conversation, Gupta touched on many of the hot elements of the Web today, including distributed conversations, search engine optimization, and FriendFeed.

"Conversations are getting distributed, and the user organization is key," Gupta said. "Not even the New York Times controls the conversation across different sites and different people. Because of the democratization of Web 2.0 from blogs to Wikis, there is no one platform that will be the single platform because of the variety of tools that is available."

SezWho's goal, made stronger with the Tejit purchase, is to find out where these conversations are happening, no matter where they are, and build a reputation score for those engaged in discussion, to help others get a good idea for who they're dealing with.

"What we have to do is offer user-centric organization to where all these conversations are happening," Gupta said. "We say conversations are happening everywhere, but how can we make those better? Everybody is creating content. Who is credible and who's not? What is good and what is not good?"

Some of the core tenets of SezWho's offering are centered around keeping the power, including search engine optimization (SEO), with the blogger. While Disqus is a strong commenting platform and offers its own rating systems, the service has at times been criticized for hosting the comment activity off the blog itself, and instead, on Disqus' servers. For those who care about such things, they don't necessarily get the SEO benefit of the comments, which they might if they used Blogger, TypePad or WordPress' native commenting systems, each of which is supported by SezWho.

"We think there should not be one central repository, but we can instead be a useful benefit to the other sites," Gupta said. "From a Google point of view or Techmeme point of view, it's not clear that the content is fresh, or being updated. You're not benefiting from the SEO value."

The combined offering hopes to help you find out more about the person you're conversing with online, thanks to SezWho's tracking their activity and building a reputation and profile, based on their interactions on the many different sites throughout the Web. Tejit's offering will greatly increase the ability to get context around the data, and show how the reputaiton of one piece of content relates to another.

"We show these profiles around the people participating to show what else has this person done," Gupta said. "You don't want just connections, but credible connections. Who is this guy, and what is his credibility? We have the best reputation engine for establishing who is credible and who is not, and we take into account all the interactions on all these sites. We can interact and provide feedback, which leads to credible content discovery."

SezWho, prior to today's news, had 11 people, including 9 full-time employees, 2 part-time staffers, and a team of 4 engineers in India, and has raised just over $1 million in funding. Tejit is a 3-person company, and in the short time since its discovery engine was in service, it has already crawled more than 5 million blogs for analysis.

It's only Wednesday, but it's already been a very big week for Yuvi Panda of TheStatBot. After launching on May 1st with an analysis of Robert Scoble's Twitter activity, Yuvi has followed on with the most detailed analysis of Techmeme ever done (well beyond my surface attempts), and has now branched out to cover other large social media sites and blogs.

Yesterday, Yuvi published the definitive analysis of Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, picking apart the popular site's 7,000+ posts and nearly 2 million words. See: TechCrunch Statistics A-W. In the analysis, Yuvi discovered the site's posts per day has accelerated dramatically from less than 5 a day three years ago, to nearly 25 a day now, as TechCrunch has gone professional, with a stable of talented writers.


TechCrunch's Posting Frequency is Up and to the Right
That post, as with nearly every analytical post from TheStatBot, made Techmeme. This rate of achieving the popular tech news site has meant that TheStatBot has now achieved a ranking on the Techmeme Leaderboard, down at #99 overall, from the last 30 days. Given my downward trajectory, I'll likely fall of the board as he rises at this pace. (See his excitement here)

Today, Yuvi follows on with a detailed review of the Twitter Clients used by Twitter Power Users, finding that among the top 100 users of Twitter, the Web interface dominates, as it does with the rank and file, but that SMS text messages, Mobile Twitter and Twitterific are much more popular clients, while Twhirl is more popular among the common users. The Web interface, in fact, encapsulates almost 60% of all activity (and more than 90% of my own activity, though I'm not in the top 100 by a long shot).


A Breakdown of the Clients Used by the Twitter 100
As mentioned a few times here, I'm a big supporter of Yuvi's work on TheStatBot. I've informally helped him discuss topics, timing, and given the occasional tip on graphics or grammar, but the work is absolutely all his own, and he's doing great. Now, the 17-year-old is looking into college admissions, and hopes his work on TheStatBot as an extra-curricular activity will help him get further along in the education process. You can help either by linking his way, or ordering up a custom analysis of your site or any service. He would be more than happy to put his analysis to work for you, and obviously does an excellent job.

Not eager to sit still, Toluu developer Caleb Elston is rolling out yet new features, just a week after making headlines with Twitter integration. This week, after seeing a great deal of usage of the newly redesigned activity page, Elston is expanding options to see new activity, now splicing the stream to show feed changes, contact updates, and favorites.

The increasingly popular OPML sharing and RSS feed matching site is still invite only (and I have many if you are interested), but in the two months since its debut, Toluu has become a flexible gateway to add new feeds, discover new content from friends, and find new peers.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing changes to Feeds.
Also new today, Toluu is dramatically expanding the number of RSS feeds available on the site. It's not just a one-way street for RSS for Toluu. Now, each filtering view (feeds, contacts and favorites) can generate a feed, just for you, for all your friends, or for the daring, for all Toluu users worldwide. Filling out that simple 3 by 3 grid means you have 9 new RSS options in aggregate.


Toluu's new Activity stream, showing contact changes.
As Caleb wrote in an e-mail yesterday, the growing user base of Toluu means that if you're not constantly watching the site's activity stream, you could miss something. Hence, the need for splicing the feed.

"We wanted to make it easier to see a particular kind of activity," he wrote. "It is super interesting being able to see what feeds Toluu users have recently marked as favorites or see who your contacts are adding to their list of contacts."

Caleb has also made himself very much available to feedback from site users. There's even a new FriendFeed room for Toluu, where he has been quite active, taking comments and requests, as well as passing out the much-desired invites: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/toluu.

And don't expect Toluu development to slow any time soon, as Caleb's got even more plans in the works, especially when it comes to better honing in on the date you need quickly.

"Filtering, either explicit or implicit, will continue to gain importance as we live with more data than can be consumed comfortably," he said. "This is just one step towards helping Toluu users get more from their activity stream."

Still don't have access to Toluu? Leave me a note in the comments and I'll send you one via e-mail. You can find me on Toluu at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray.