Today marks the beginning of a great period for Intense Debate. We are announcing our move to a closed Beta. We feel that our system has solidified so that it is somewhat stable and therefore denotes the move from “Alpha” to “Beta.”

Over the past week we have partnered with some great blogs who have been very patient with us. So, to Political Grind, Stix, and David…thank you.

Speaking of David, he has a great post today about us over at Colorado Startups. Also today, Brad Feld wrote a post about the problem we are addressing and how we have approached it.

All in all, we are very pleased with our progress as we are adding more blogs everyday. If you want to be including in our testing, sign up and we will be in touch! Cheers.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News

Another week full of progress at Intense Debate. We are slowly adding our comments to partnering blogs with many more to come in the near future. You can find the latest additions here.

Right now anyone can join Intense Debate as a user and start building your reputation by commenting on one of our early blog partners. If you write a blog and would like to see Intense Debate Comments on them, sign up!

Last Friday Josh attended the TechCrunch party in Menlo Park and had a blast. It was a great time and certainly more people know about Intense Debate in that part of the world than they did before. It was great to interact with some of the other startups demoing as well and asking questions about their experience. Some of them had really impressive products and we wish them the best.

Back in Boulder we are getting ready to graduate from TechStars and move on to the next phase in our journey. We will certainly look back on this Summer fondly!

If you would like to stay up to date on our progress, please subscribe to our RSS feed in the upper right corner of our blog

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News

One month ago we were about to release a product. It was at that point we realized after much consultation with the TechStars mentors that although very impressive and useful, our strategy was off. In a sense, what was our long term goal has now become our near term goal. In the past month we have been developing and internally testing what we believe to be a far more viable product.

Many moons ago we realized that great debate happens within blog posts in the comment section. However, the structure of commenting systems is largely unchanged since their creation with a few minor exceptions. Normally, blog comments are displayed in chronological order forcing the user to say “@JoeShmo” if they wanted to reply to someone. This issue of disconnected conversations quickly dissolves any useful discussion going on within the comments. There is also a problem of accountability of commenters, comments which lack content, and the equality of spam comments with good comments. Publishers now have an alternative with ID Comments.

At Intense Debate it has become our goal to increase the value and volume of conversation in blog comments and create a replacement to what we refer to as your factory installed comment system. With our new system we will incorporate features like tracking, reputation, threading, and voting to solve the problems mentioned above. This aids the publisher and their readers. The publisher will have people spending more time on their site and have traffic driven to their blog from our site. Readers of blogs with ID Comments installed will flourish in an environment that encourages conversation and discussion while rewarding those judged by their peers to make the best comments. Readers will also be able to track the comments of their friends across any blog where ID Comments are installed.

In the coming days we will release our comments into the blogs of some of our mentors and a few personal blogs. We hope everyone will participate by creating a profile and trying it out by commenting on one of our partnered blogs.  We are also asking for feedback.

You can either post your feedback on our forums or send us an email (contactus at intensedebate dot com).

If you love our system and would like to see it on your blog, please sign up on the homepage as we will gradually phase people in before releasing to all publishers. Those signing up earliest will get first dibs.

Needless to say, stay tuned.

Josh, Jon, and Isaac

Founders of IntenseDebate.com

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News

This is definitely Startup Weekend. In downtown Boulder, a group of about 70 coders, designers, marketers, lawyers, etc are getting together to crank out a web startup in three days. They are live blogging the whole process and it is tremendously entertaining and educational.

At Intense Debate, we are having our own mini version of Startup Weekend right here in the Intense Debate worldwide headquarters. As you can tell by the new comments section on this blog (Powered by ID Comments), some of our work is paying off.

 At the end of this week we will have a more in depth post on what has happened the last month and get everyone caught up on our progress.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in News