Disclosure: this post is being written as an entry in this EntreCard contest.
Entrecard has set up some kind of a partnership with SezWho to encourage organic comments. According to the post on the Entrecard blog,
When you can take a quality blog that isn’t receiving any comments, and give them 10 or 20 high-quality comments per post… that’s revolutionary in our opinion.
Well, yeah, alright. In my own dorky and probably inflated opinion I have a quality blog. I usually manage to snag a few comments per post. I already have SezWho on my blog, and I’ve seen it on others, but I’ve never viewed it as an incentive to comment more or less. What does that for me is CommentLUV and dofollow. But I’m open-minded and I respect Graham Langdon a lot. Graham is an astute businessman: I’m sure something in the deal will make things better for Entrecard. I just hope it does something for ME! In their usual Entrecardian fashion, Entrecard is exhorting bloggers to blog this, and they’ve provided guaranteed EC credits as an incentive.
For the contest, here is what you have to do:
| Hey Entrecard. I already have SezWho on my blog and I am officially informing you of that fact. I have two internet blogs and they both have SezWho. Do I get double? | 100 points |
| Yoo Hoo! I’m posting about it like you asked! | 100 points |
| Did the supersecret thing too that I’m not allowed to mention in the post. Go to the contest if you want to know what it is. | 50 points |
| Tweeted about it too.: | 50 points |
| Commented on Turnip of Power, not once, but TWICE! do I get a bonus for twice? | 50 points |
So, as I read the rules, I am owed at least 350 points and am eligible for the really big prize…. what? A drawing?
OK, now for some original commentary consisting of my usual spate of strongly held dorkish opinions, technobabble and all the other crap I am (un)known for:
- Yes Mr. Turnip, I will toss the favicon default and the sezwho stars and replace both with tiny propeller beanies.
- IMHO, SezWho does a TERRIBLE JOB explaining the benefits of their system, and Graham has not really shed any additional light on the subject. I’m sure he understands the benefits, and I am beginning to, but I think the Entrecard community would appreciate some examples of how this can benefit them. For example, I can’t find a link I can show you to my dynamite
SexWhoSezWho profile. There is a page called publicprofile.php but it only shows my profile if I am logged in. I have searched in vain for a dynamic or mod_rewrite style link to my profile that I can post. Help?? - And now for the real technical head scratcher. I’m going to CC this to SezWho themselves if to find out the answer. I originally signed up for SezWho via BlogCatalog. I have five blogs deployed from a single instance of wordpress based on the instructions provided at Ryan McDonell (which unfortunately seems to have gone away.
Arrrgh!) OK, well the gist of it is that you symlink all the code and plugins from one central location, and each blog has its own physical and separate config, uploads, themes, etc. Two of my blogs are for general internet consumption, one is local, one is personal, and one belongs to a minor who is biological issue of mine. At least two blogs I host, and possibly more, have the sezwho plugin activated. With each activation, SezWho sent me an “activation code.” However, I only have ONE actual physical place where the plugin lives. Without delving deeply into the plugin code, I just want to say that in my wordpress dashboard for this blog, it keeps saying that SezWho needs to be “activated” in order to work, and yet it seems to work just fine. Since it appears to do comments just fine I never bothered about it. Is there something I could physically instantiate from the shared SezWho folder so that everything would be kosher? I can find out by reading code, but I’d prefer that someone in the know just provide the answer and instructions. Reading code is not fun. Anyone know?
OK, already found the answer to bullet point #2. It’s the sezwho badge. Let’s see if I can plop the javascript in the middle of a post. Woot it works! Mouse over that puppy and you’ll see all my lovely SezWho action. And there would have been more if I’d known what I know now! And I found exactly what I wanted eventually, though SezWho would benefit from making it easier to find. It’s the direct hyperlink to my profile. It will be in your browser address bar when you click “More” on your sezwho popup profile. It’s a huge honkin’ thing so I tinyURL’d it and I’d suggest after you find yours that you do the same.
I forgot to mention that Turnip of Power has a set of tiny Entrecard icons you can download for free to replace the default stars, and also instructions to do it. And if you read the snazzy souped up comments, Gary Hess raised some excellent questions about customizing your sezwho, and then answered his own question with this link: http://sezwho.com/install_wp_d.php#template
What are you waiting for? Go ahead! Install the Sezwho commenting system in all its glory and then test it out by commenting on my blog. Your SezWho comment profile will be another social site that you can exploit, another feather in your cap, and another footprint that will be there when you die and beyond, if you will. And I’ll give 200 points myself to anyone who can give me a solution for the last bullet point in a lucid manner. The test will be
- does wordpress stop telling me I need to do something
- and the plugin still works
- over in sezwho it actually lists dorkage.net as VALIDATED?
Listen to this post 
I don’t exactly know the answers to any of your questions (sadly) but here’s something else that has ruffled my feathers about SezWho:
It messes with my WordPress themes! For whatever reason it replaces the p’s around the comments with a p and a br, making it not XHTML. It doesn’t bother the theme much, but I can imagine others getting HUGE headaches from it.
It also needs more custimization features… as does the WordPress plugin for it. Why can’t I take off the ‘Who am I?’ completely? If I have the who am I already linked to the image, why does it have to have another link? Meh…
Anyway, nice post… hopefully you find your answers.
Dang diggity dang, now I have to run this thing through W3 validater again to see if it messes up MY theme. Thanks for stopping by. You obviously can customize SezWho, but you probably have to delve in to the nuts and bolts of it’s CSS, as in manually. Turnip has turnips on his, and I’ve seen different Text for that Who am I, and my blog seems to have none at all. And I finally did find the simple link to my SezWho profile.
But not the multiple blog question. Other plugins have choked on that too.
Oh I know those things can be done easily. But I want the ‘Who am I’ entirely gone, not just changed and I haven’t found out how to do that. You can change the CSS easily within the SezWho control panel, so that isn’t he problem. I had a look through the SezWho plugin to see if I can fix it from there but haven’t had any luck yet. I found a section that has what I was looking for, but edited it and had no luck.
It is a mystery to me…
I am still investigating this one. All I know is that thousands of bloggers will now be installing this plugin. From an accessibility point of view I am not sure if it is a good thing encouraging all these little pop-ups all over the show. Not sure about all this yet though, will need further investigation. The poor non-EC sites could also start losing comments because of this scheme (I think). I am known for being suspicious of new ideas but right now I smell a monopoly in the making, hopefully I am wrong.
sailors last blog post..Four Things
Alright, found out some things. More customization can be done than I previously thought, just finding out how was a little confusing. Here’s a link to the page I found (a link to it is only on the download page for some reason) http://sezwho.com/install_wp_d.php#template
It helped me out quite a bit, so hopefully it helps out others as well.
Hi, i just wanted to mention that I re-uploaded my entres.zip file. The text file was wrong. I added some extra ^M’s when I copied it that needed to be deleted. Works fine now. Go check out evilwoobies site to see her icons now.
Turnips last blog post..Entrecard Saves Blogging
Thanks lads. Gary, if you posted in the contest you oughta mention that link. I’ll revise my post later today and mention it, and also how to just do a straight hyperlink to your profile without all the fancy widget stuff around it. And I gave your comment top marks. Sailor, you don’t have to be EC to get sezwho, but we do miss you. They are CSS popups, in that they don’t trigger a popup alert, but maybe they should be fitted out with audio or something. Thanks for keeping us honest! And thanks Turnip! I saw the ^M’s and I’ve been bit by them before, I was gonna fix ‘em when I did the install. They bite the poor unfortunates who use Windows (and by extension anyone who downloads stuff from them.)
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of the Sezwho popups too. I’ve decided to implement the system for the next week and use that time as a trial run to decide if it should stay or go. If I could tweak the code just that it would just show the comment ratings and get rid of the ‘who am I’ link and the CSS popups then I’d be a lot more satisfied with the idea. For now it seems cool but we’ll see how I, and more importantly my readers, feel about it in a week!
Adam Pieniazeks last blog post..20 Mac Applications I Just Deleted
Well I don’t know that you can say that EC is encouraging organic comments with this partnership with SezWho because they are offering an artificial incentive to comment on EC blogs.
I talk about a number of things that EntreCard is doing wrong over at this post. I’d love for you to chime in with your opinions.
Specifically, I think EntreCard’s price fixing of EC credits is a problem. I think the fact that the EC system sets advertising rates per blog is another.
Richard Cattos last blog post..[CARTOON] I found a great new cartoonist – Johnny Ancich
I’ll have to say, EntreCard got me. I am not going to jump through the hoops to promote SezWho, but I was quick to sign up. I like the idea; however, I don’t want to have to write something about it.
I’ve had SezWho on my blogs for over a month now, so I’m thrilled that EC has joined up with them, and I’m already doing SezWho! I’ve had no problems with SezWho whatsoever.
So, I’m not seeing the tell tale signs of the Sez Who domination. No little Propellers or anything. So I guess you have changed your mind in the last 10 days.
The problem I have with Sez Who is that it stores all my comments made with it’s program, Even though I never signed on with them.
They have 7 pages of me (maybe 8 by now) just commenting away. Any more when I see Sez who, I become very tight lipped and cagey when commenting, which isn’t right. If you haven’t figured it out yet I like, No Love, To express my thought fully and to the point. I love communicating and Sez who keeps me from doing that big time. Grrr!
Beamer
The reason you don’t see the propellers here is cuz sezwho had an issue with multiple blogs on same database. They have a fix but I havent installed it yet. The propellers actually showed up on my other blog
http://food.dorkage.net because that one is the first one I installed sezwho on and the only one where it’s completely and properly registered.
I think the storage of your comments is the whole point of sezwho. they want to make a comment profile of you. When people see it they think oh wow here is a guy/gal who comments a lot. Look what intelligent and succinct comments.
I agree with you I think you should be able to decide whether you let sezwho make a copy of your comment, or be able to edit it or something. I don’t like some third party controlling content created by me. Maybe if you claim your profile you can do something I dunno.