New comment whizzies

There is ever a war for popularity with any new whizzie gadgets: Betamax vs VHS, Microsoft vs DR Dos, Microsoft vs Apple, Microsoft vs intelligence... and on the net side of things, there is far too many competitors for blogging software, either install your own like Wordpress or Moveable Type, or sites like Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., etc., etc....

But it looks like there is also a fight for commenting functionality. The one that looks to be dominating everything is OpenID, an easy way to have a "single digital identity" on the internet. (Um, aren't people against being a number?)

However, it's not enough to have one identity, you can alternatively look the same, using Gravatars (globally recognised avatars)! Now you can have a little wee image that follows you around as you comment anywhere (or, for users of Wordpress, you can create distinctive Wavatars to make things look pretty).

All these things require users of the blogging software to make changes to activate this functionality (although it does look like software makers and blogging sites are taking away that choice), and so the popularity war is underway.

I don't have an OpenID Gravatar yet, but I'm sure it's the coming thing.

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