When you visit some blogs you will not that next to many of the comments you will see icons with a picture or image representing the person who wrote the comment.  These pictures are known as avatars which is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users. The use of avatars personalizes the comments and increases visitor participation in the comments section.

The challenge is that people get tired of uploading their graphics to every site that they visit.  This is where gravatars come in.  A garavatar is a Globally Recognized Avatars which can be used on multiple blogs and web sites.  So if I register my image with Gravatar, at www.Gravatar.com I can use my image or gravatar on any site that supports them.  While support is not universal, there are Gravator plugins or integration with tools like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more than 20 mores systems and programming languages.

Since Gravatar was acquired by Automattic, the force behind WordPress, it’s expected that WordPress support might even be integrated out of the box in future versions.  However, with these plugins integration is pretty simple today:

• WordPress - A host of plugins can be found at the Wordpress Codex
• Drupal - Gravatar Integration
• Joomla - Avatar/Gravatar Plugin

While Gravatars are popular, they pale by comparison to Twitter. Smashing Magazine has released a plugin which shows a commenter’s Twitter avatar in the comment area. There are still a lot of blog commenters who haven’t signed up with Gravatar many of these people may use Twitter so in effect, this plugin reduces the number of ‘default avatars’ showing in your comment area.

The plugin first tries to load a gravatar and if one is not found than it loads the user’s avatar by matching the email address to the user’s Twitter email address.  Only if neither match does it load the boring default avatar.

Whether an avatar, a gravatar or a Twitter logo - any of the above personalize your comment section and can help to increase comments and traffic.

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