comment power Jitendra Gupta and I have participated in an ongoing email and blog discussion about the tapping the unused power of comments to strengthen community, drive traffic and rank commenters to make it easier for readers to find quality blogs.
Today, Jitendra gave me a demo of his CommentPower WordPress plugin, which I will be installing on my blogs in short order. It was helpful to see the commenting system live and operational. I’m pretty good at picking up new ideas, but nothing sells like a live demo.

CommentPower takes some cues from MyBlogLog, which was recently picked up by Yahoo, CoComment, which seems to have lost whatever early traction they had with early adopters and TailRank an aggregator/memetracker which finds the hottest posts from thousands of blogs. There are hints of Digg and Slashdot as well.

CommentPower lets you rank and filter comments based on popularity. Sorting comments based on reputation (single site only for now) is a snap.

Jitendra will be posting a lot more about CommentPower on his blog and the website soon enough. Once sufficiently groked, this is the kind of service that lends itself to all sorts of improvements and enhancements, although it appears quite useful even for single blogs in it’s current incarnation.

The only downside I see so far is the reliance on blog plugins, which are the Achilles heel when it comes to gaining traction in the blogosphere. It’s going to take thousands of installs for the system to achieve enough mass to become truly useful as a social tool, for now brings new functionality to comments, which have always been an afterthought on most blogging systems.

We’re moving from driving traffic to a blog to driving traffic to the comment section of blogs. The atomization of the conversation continues, all the way down to the Twitter level.

Freakanomics has a post about comments, which has 115 comments of varying level of interest and insight, about, you guessed it, comments.