One of the announcements that came out of the TechStars event today was that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, has acquired the hosted blog-comment service Intense Debate for an undisclosed amount. You can read WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s thoughts about it, as well as those of Automattic CEO Toni Schneider and Intense Debate co-founder Jon Fox, and you can also read some comments from Daniel Ha, the founder of Disqus, the hosted blog-comment service that is probably Intense Debate’s single biggest competitor in the comment-o-sphere.

In his blog post and in comments made to Mashable’s Adam Ostrow about the deal, Daniel is very diplomatic about the acquisition, saying it was a good move for Automattic and Intense Debate, and that “I think Disqus (and others in the space) will continue to work harder on offerings for users of WordPress and the many other platforms.” One of the main financial backers behind Disqus — Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures — took the same line in comments to me via Twitter. “Its great for the 3rd party comment system market,” he said. “It validates the category.”

All that said, however, there’s little doubt that this is going to put some pressure on Disqus. WordPress is undoubtedly going to integrate Intense Debate into its platform in a pretty major way, and will also push it to all of the millions of bloggers who use either WordPress.com or hosted WordPress (as I do). That’s going to have an effect on adoption rates, there’s no question. Fred said in his message that he hopes there is a level playing field: “I hope WP doesn’t play favorites,” he said. “Bloggers need choice.”

For my part, I remain a satisfied user of Disqus.

I’m late on this news, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention today’s update to the Disqus hosted-comment service, which I’ve been using on this blog for some time now. As I’ve said before, I think Disqus is one of the best comment systems going, and now it has gotten even better. One of the main criticisms of the service up until today was that the comments made on a blog post were hosted by Disqus and therefore not available to the blog publisher should something go wrong. The update to the service makes it truly two-way, with a synchronization process for WordPress and the ability to export comments.

Disqus has also made it easier for bloggers to administer their comments, integrating the admin panel right into the WordPress admin dashboard. The initial version of the Disqus 2.0 plugin caused some problems for me and some other WP users, but within a matter of hours there was a fix — and the whole time it was being pushed out to users, founder Daniel Ha was responding on Twitter and through the Disqus support forum, and keeping users updated. That was one of the first things that impressed me about Disqus, actually: Daniel’s dedication to remaining in touch and both responding to and fixing problems quickly.

Allen Stern at Centernetworks has a run-down on some of the other enhancements, which include the fact that comments handled by Disqus are now “SEO friendly,” meaning that bloggers don’t lose any of the Google juice they might otherwise have gotten — another thing some critics had suggested was a flaw in the way Disqus was structured. According to some previous critics such as David Risley, the new Disqus has more than answered their complaints about the service. Congrats to Daniel and his team on a great upgrade.

So Disqus has enabled support for video comments from Seesmic, which launched the feature on TechCrunch awhile back. Even Fred Wilson of A VC — who is an investor in Disqus — admits in his post that he isn’t sure about whether video comments work or not. And there are lots of people who are pretty sure that they don’t work, because you can’t scan them as easily as you can text, because they clutter up a blog and make it slow to load, and so on. And I must admit that when TechCrunch first launched them, I wasn’t too crazy about the idea either.

As I’ve said before on several occasions, I’m not really a video guy. I don’t think it adds that much to have video, unless (as Scoble notes in Fred’s comment section) you are showing someone something that relies on the visual element, like a new gadget or a new baby. But when I wrote my earlier post on the topic, I was mostly talking about video blogs — the ones that are exclusively video. Unless you’re Loren Feldman of 1938media (and let’s face it, who is?) that kind of thing reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer bought an old talk-show set and turned his living room into a fake talk show, but no one would go on.

That said, I’m actually thinking that video comments aren’t such a bad idea (some people continue to disagree). I don’t want everyone to use them, and I don’t want all the comments on a blog to be video — but in some cases it’s kind of fun to see Mike Arrington talking about Wired magazine, or to see Fred in person chatting into his web-cam. It is much more personal (which is why some people will probably never do it). But I actually don’t think it’s that bad. I think it adds a little variety — and if you don’t want to watch them, then you don’t have to. For an alternate (and hilarious) view, see this overview by Scrivs at Expert Idiot.

There seems to be a mini-bitchmeme brewing, sparked by VC blogger Fred Wilson’s recent post about Disqus, which is the commenting system that I use on this blog and many others use as well. Why Fred decided to write about Disqus at this point I don’t know — maybe to give the company some free publicity, who knows. In any case, he listed three reasons why he thinks every blogger should use it, including:

• threaded discussions
• email replies
• shared profiles

That was followed relatively quickly by a post from David Risley, in which he said that Disqus seemed “stupid”, primarily because the comments are hosted somewhere else, and therefore they don’t integrate with a blog’s existing comments and if Disqus disappears then those comments are gone for good. Others have noted that Disqus doesn’t support trackbacks either — which I have also mentioned in the past as a drawback of the system, and something I would like to see.

For the record, Daniel Ha of Disqus has promised that both trackbacks and data exportability are coming to Disqus, which would remove a couple of the major complaints about the service. But even with those flaws — or missing features — I am happy to use it, and Fred puts his finger on one big reason why: the ability to respond to comments instantly via email (and also to approve or delete spam via email). As Fred notes, this is huge. And it is handled seamlessly.

Spam — which Don Dodge mentions as an issue in his post — has also been virtually eradicated. I think in the months I’ve had it integrated with my blog, I’ve had Disqus email me twice or maybe three times with a possible spam comment, and in each case I simply replied with “delete” or “approve” and it was handled. Like Fred and Howard, I would encourage anyone looking for a better comment system to give it a try. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, as far as I’m concerned. Carlos says he thinks that Google should buy Disqus.

I don’t use Plaxo’s Pulse — a kind of aggregator for social information about you and your friends — but I think it’s interesting that they have integrated any comments posted through Pulse with the Disqus comment system, which I have been using on my blog for some time now and am a big fan of. As Daniel Ha of Disqus mentions on the company blog, the various threads of disconnected conversation that are occurring in different corners of the blogosphere is something that is crying out for a solution, and Disqus could be the one to solve it.

One of the most recent flash points in that area occurred when Shyftr showed up on the scene, pulling full feeds from blogs such as mine and allowing people to share them and comment on them. Some people were upset about the fact that their RSS feed was being used as the foundation for someone else’s business, but others were also concerned that comments occurring on Shyftr weren’t connected to their blogs any more. The same type of issue has come up with other aggregation-style services such as FriendFeed (which allows you to post comments back to Twitter, etc. but not to blogs).

Congrats to Daniel Ha — who Mark Evans recently interviewed for his blog — on taking the first step in helping to tie those loose strands of conversation together. It almost makes up for the fact that Disqus still doesn’t support trackbacks :-)

Update:

Founder Nick Halstead pointed out to me that Fav.or.it — a feed aggregator that also aggregates comments — allows comments that are posted inside the service to be integrated with blogs as well, although Fav.or.it has not gotten rave reviews from some.