Artiklz Aggregates All the Social Media Activity around Your Content to Your Blog

Last week I had a chance to speak with the team at Artiklz, a San Francisco based startup that is officially debuting in public alpha tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. The startup works in the blog commenting field and the first thing I thought was that the field was over-saturated already and did not need yet another player to add to Disqus, recently acquired by Automattic IntenseDebate or JS-Kit.

To my surprise, this has been a rare case when during a briefing I immediately saw a value in the product for Profy and was thinking about installing it right when it is available and stable.

Basically what Artiklz does is integrating everything that people say about the content of your blog anywhere on social media sites right into your blog posts. For that Artiklz offers a widget that is installed on a blog and shows all the activity from various social media services about this or that post right below the internal comments about that post.

The public alpha is launched with only 4 social media sited supported (Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and FriendFeed) but the team promises to constantly add new services so that the social media coverage could be actually large-scale one here. I think a great addition could be StumbleUpon where users review the pages they like in particular and of course Twitter - simply by pulling the tweets containing the link to the original blog post.

In addition to the social media comments widget, Artiklz also offers a badge that can be installed on a blog to allow any reader to track the blog using the preferred method.

An important part is that the service will be useful not only to bloggers as we will be grabbing conversations everywhere and bringing them where they belong (well, at least we often believe it belongs where the initial discussion started - on our blog and not on Digg or Reddit) but to blog readers as well. The thing is that Artiklz not only offers the widget for bloggers to install but a very sophisticated tracking system where every user can track a blog, a particular post or a person - everything that happens on that post or on that particular blog post. Every time a new comment in submitted or a new vote is cast, a user will receive notification using his or her preferred method - email, IM, or SMS.

This service does not compete with Disqus or other comments management services from what I see - instead they have mentioned they would be integrating with such services whenever they can to help distribute the widget to more publishers. I myself see Artiklz as a great fit for Disqus and a great acquisition object for large blogging platforms like Automattic’s Wordpress and Google’s Blogger.com or SixApart with its vast collection of blogging tools available. I believe such an acquisition is actually the exit strategy the team behind Artiklz sees for itself but it could also be possible to start by signing partnership agreements with such owners of blogging platforms as well to help with distribution.

Of course the best thing about Artiklz is that it allows everyone - both blog readers and the blog owner - fully realize the scope of the conversation about the post. I have been looking for a while for some tool that would notify me when someone submits a post from Profy to some social bookmarking or voting sites so that I could add some further traction to that post. Unfortunately, my lengthy research has not returned any significant results so I even started to think about building some bookmarking tool on our own. But after watching Artiklz presentation, I can tell you that I am pretty confident I have found what I was looking for - so if they eventually add all the social networks I am mostly active in, this could be the last argument for me to adopt.

For the hesitant blog owners Artiklz offers a demo for a blog owner to see how a blog will look like with the social media widget installed - without doing any actual install. Take a look and maybe it could influence your decision. I myself will be sure to look closer at what the team behind Artiklz is doing to make sure that the first version that is stable enough gets installed on Profy.