SezWho acquires Tejit to expand commenter reputations
SezWho picks up a semantic crawling engine.
Distributed commenter reputation service SezWho is growing a little bigger Wednesday morning with the acquisition of Tejit, an engine that tracks content around the Web to see how it links up with people, events, places, and more. The tool began as a pet project for creator Indus Khaitan, who wanted to sort through blog content to find who had the most gravitas on any topic or in a certain field.
What does this mean for SezWho? SezWho's founder, Jitendra Gupta, tells me that in the next two to three months users of the add-on reputation system for comments, forums, and more will get a whole new layer of reputation ratings based on what types of communities they're interacting with. For example, a highly reputable user who frequents tech blogs will come into blogs in other disciplines like science or politics with a slightly higher starting reputation than a standard user. The same goes for bad users, who will come into new areas with a bit of a warning above their heads to give other users the heads-up.
This same system will be applied retroactively to any other conversations that have been tracked for SezWho users. That will effectively augment some people's ratings for better or worse.
In my call with Gupta last week, he spent a lot of time digging into FriendFeed, which has received a lion's share of the attention in the Web 2.0 community and quickly is becoming a destination site of its own.
Gupta argues that SezWho is laying a better groundwork for content owners since people will follow what their friends are doing online using a system that doesn't take eyeballs away from the original content--something FriendFeed has recently strayed away from a bit with its rooms implementation. I don't put the two in the same class of sites, but I can see where he's coming from after designing a service that lets you keep tabs on people as long as they're visiting SezWho-enabled sites.
As to whether there would be a client-side version of the reputation service to remedy interactions with non-integrated sites, Gupta would not comment.