The Progress Bar

Readers know that I am strongly behind any company who improves the relationship between bloggers and their audience.  SezWho has been on my radar for some time now, and I’m a big fan of MyBlogLog, which you can see in the sidebar.

Look at what Movable Type 4 has in store:

They have also released a new community component that beefs up the basic community features. The component adds a ratings system and deeper user profiles. The ratings system consists of post specific user ratings and a buzz feature that tracks the highest rated content. The new profile pages consist of a blog, their latest comments, and recommendations on your site. The infrastructure for these enhancements exist in the basic version, but buying the community component provides them out of the box and comes with support. They plan on releasing more components in the future.

This is similar to what SezWho is attempting, but baked right into the platform itself. Connecting blog communities with each other via ranking and reputation is going to be a very hot niche in coming months as the players continue to vie for major traffic drivers and social functionality.

Jeremiah Owyang on Web Strategy Predictions: Facebook, Identity, Social Networks.

Facebook will launch an Identity widget that I can embed on my blog. This allows only those who have registered to Facebook to leave a comment, many high profile blogs will do this, to avoid nasty anonymous comments, thus reducing the incident of Kathy Sierra type events. Dave Winer is right.

-The data collected from these widgets ables Facebook to erode the small marketshare that Attention trackers and MyBlogLog are creating.

-Facebook will have faster adoption that Open ID, as the consumer users will drive it. (Remember the mantra of consider joining before creating communities)

More about community groups and social networking, worth a read.