what is really unfortunate here is that by being obstinate and combative with briansmith and plagiarismtoday, konsi is missing a solid business opportunity here.<p>As far as I can tell the mechanism to identify users is based on name and URL which is probably the best you can do. What this does create is a centralized ID for blog commentators.<p>By registring as a blog <i>commentator</i> with backtype, commentators could have a mechanism to control the distribution of their comments: control over copyright issues like the size of their excerpt or the ability to opt out.<p>At the same time, backtype ends up as the repository of record for comments and has an alias database of commentators, which I can anticipate being monetizable.<p>Every opportunity starts out looking like a snake.