As I learned on Techcrunch, Seesmic, a video conversation start-up – founded by Loic Le Meur, a well-known European entrepreneur – released a WordPress plugin which enables video comments for WordPress blogs. Seesmic is a video Twitter, at its simplest level and with the WordPress plugin, their video communication platform is now available for embedding in blogs. I think this plugin might be a game changer in terms of visitor engagement and would love to see how appealing it will be for real estate bloggers. MyBlogLog was the first break-through in my opinion in making blogs personal by letting visitors express their personalities through their photos. Many times when I visit the this blog, first I check the recent visitors in the right sidebar to see if I find any familiar faces. Self-expression is the very core of blogging and social media in general, and nobody knows the marketing value of face recognition better than real estate agents.

The Seesmic video commenting platform opens a new level of personal engagement by allowing visitors and the blog authors to add recorded video to the post and to the comments without ever leaving the site. The Automattic owned Gravatar service has already provided a way to automatically add avatar photos to comments, but the video commenting platform now enables real video conversations around a topic. For example, while I’ve been reading Michael Arrington’s posts for quite some time (he is the founder of TechCrunch), but I’ve never heard him talking live besides a few random videos I ran into. Now I can listen to him arguing a point on his blog comments. Video commenting is now enabled across all TechCrunch posts.

There are clearly some issues, which may make it more adaptable for some kind of blogs and less for others:

• What happens when all hell break loose through video comments? Videos can be very reveling about somebody’s state of mind and intention. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the context
• Allowing everybody to leave videos can take over the style and theme of a blog, which might not be what the blog author wished for.
• How does it effect SEO of your blog if less comments are indexed?
• Webcam videos are kind of unprofessional in quality. Will it be in conflict with the image that a real estate professional strives to project?

That said, I think this is definitely something extremely powerful and Seesmic’s implementation is very intuitive. Whether Seesmic or some upcoming solutions from their competitors will be the ultimate solution, I don’t know, but for the time being, there is no other platform which enables such a smooth transition from text based conversation to video.

For those of you who would like to experiment with this new plugin on your own WordPress blog, the download and deployment instructions can be found on the Seesmic Wiki. I strongly suggest to use the video commenting plugin with moderated comments only, as unchecked videos can be more harmful than regular text comments. I am not sure if Seesmic accepts public registration already. If they don’t, here is a workaround I used to get in. I started a video comment on TechCrunch which required me to enter some basic registration information, then using the same username and password I could log in at Seesmic with no problem.

If any of you deployed this on your own blog, please share the link below as a comment.