Disqus also has a couple of useful perks built in, such as open it, fb connect, twitter logins, etc., however the same open commenting can be easily implemented into your blog using plugins.

Here's why I'm semi-against discuss:
1)Filtering: Commentor >> Askimet >> Me >> Posted Comment Vs. Commentor >> Askimet >> Disqus >> Me >> Posted Comment .. ? Kind of a wash to me.
2) Having better design control over how the comments look is appealing to me. I just found a couple of tutorials on making author comments and admin comments stand out on wordpress (will be posting article soon, I promise!)
3) Biggest reason: MENTALITY: I'm going to give out link love, so at the end of the day, I'm going to get some link love back. No one can tell me that having commentluv enabled on your blog does not get you gobs of new traffic and tons of repeat traffic, even if you only have 1 or 2 tech or seo related posts. Webmasters love connecting with other webmasters.
4) You have the option with Disqus now to enable comment luv, so they must see it as worthwhile.
5) I hate, hate, hate nofollow. Wanna hear Matt Cutts stutter? Ask him what's the point of no follow? (Oh my I hope I'm not opening a huge debate on this)
6) 100 outgoing links on a page — From Matt Cutts blog itself, and that's just a “benchmark”. What on earth am I talking about? The approximate number of outgoing links before your site will be umm “penalized” for lack of a better term. Actually, a much better way to think of it is like this:

You have a website with a certain amount of “link juice”. For each link that you have outgoing beyond a reasonable amount, the strength of your outgoing link juice goes down. So if I had 44 grams of sugar in my link juice going out, and I add 100 links, lets say each link now only gets 27 grams of sugar.

There's a ton of webmasters that hog their PR and dont want to send outbound links because they haven't figured this out yet. Don't over link and your fine.

Guess what? Google pays attention to who you link to! According to SEOMoz, this is one of the biggest factors that webmasters don't take into consideration.

Your outbound links are going to tell Google alot about your “community”, and whether you are in a good link neighborhood, or a bad one. There was a time if you linked out to John Choo, you could expect an immediate drop 20+ slots for almost any keyword. This brings me to my next point.

7) Comment Luv feels like an umm open-gated community (if that makes any sense), where only kind, loving people hang out that believe in spreading the wealth. I love to browse top traffic blogs and see whats new and cool.. So I come across this blog, “One Mans Blog”, and think, hmm, catchy title, good content.. There's a chat bar on the bottom and one user logged on (it's 4:30am, EST) and he says “hey, how's it going”. So there I am talking with the blog owner about this and that. A little while into the conversation as he's giving me more and more incredible tips, not just SEO tips but solid gold tips – branding, monetizing, etc, it finally dawns on me (after a quick trip to Alexa) this guy has an Alexa rank that makes me drool and makes at least half a mil a year. Working a couple hours a weak. I learned so much from talking to the guy. Guess what, he uses Comment Luv.

I want to address the part about not closing deals from comments; I have to disagree in a roundabout way: You're almost never going to close a deal from a comment directly – that's not the point. Comments are for people that ain't gonna buy your product anyways but wanna talk about it, or share some insight, or have already bought what your selling and want to say something nice about it. Comments establish ethos. A blog without comments is like a medicine bottle without a label. Would you take the blue pill? Heck no.

Finally – and you're going to find this hard to believe -

I'm the worlds biggest fanatic about comments. Leave me a great comment and I'll give you your well deserved link. But I report well wishers as spam daily (just read my comment spam manifesto).

Every single comment that I've ever gotten accross 20 sites now that has that little heart icon and a blog post has been a good, relevant comment that even the comment stickler in me likes. And I have to approve it.

On a final note, the only people that are going to check that little box next to the heart to display their last blog post are the people that actually know what commentluv is. I don't know how commentluv does it, but all those people are damn nice. Whatever I've lost in a very teensy tiny little amount of link juice that flows throughout my site, I've gained in webmasters doing my deeplinking for me, and linking to posts they found interesting enough to comment on. Even if they we're only motivated to comment to get a link from my site.

Well, that's all for me for now. I gotta connect with Phoenix Real Estate Guy if you can put him in touch with me; I finally got around to looking at his site and realized he's running thesis. I have a ton of questions for him…