In Traction

I am now using Disqus to handle the comments on my blog. Disqus is a new global blog commenting system. It has a lot of nice features, such as avatars, threaded conversations and global notifications. It allows you to track when a comment you posted got replied to and will in the future even support SMS notifications (hopefully this will work in Belgium as well). The Disqus forum page for this blog can be found at http://intraction.disqus.com/.

They have a simple Wordpress plugin that you can install. I ticked the option “Replace all entries with no comments (including future posts)” to keep my existing comments, and use Disqus for posts without comments. When they have an import system, I will probably import all existing comments into the system as well.

Robert Scoble did an interview with Daniel Ha, the CEO of Disqus.

I read an article about Everyscape. Everyscape tries to give its users an immersive experience by stitching together a set of panoramic photographs, in contrast with the satellite imagery that is being used by other tools such as Google Earth. I played a bit with the NY demo and was pretty impressed.

Apparently their web-based software is based on the initial software by the founder’s previous company, Mok3. There is a great video that shows a tour through a long hallway at MIT which was constructed of only 20 panoramic photographs. I found another (less impressive) Youtube video of Mok3’s software:

It reminded me a bit of Microsoft’s Photosynth, which was presented at TED this year:

Kris pointed me to Picnik, a new Web 2.0 application to edit pictures in your browser. It’s one of the prettiest Web 2.0 apps I have ever used, the user interface is very snappy with lots of nice transitions and effects.