I took a look at this and then went to IntenseDebate's home page. The first thing I saw was a glowing testimonial by Brad Feld ("frighteningly good"). That got me curious. A little googling confirms that IntenseDebate is a TechStars company (which the OP implied anyway).

Does that strike anyone else as dodgy?

Edit: maybe I should be more clear. What struck me as dodgy is that Feld is an investor with an interest in praising the product, but this was not disclosed. Even his company affiliation was listed as something other than TechStars.

To be fair, the Disqus guys are proud of being used by Fred Wilson, and I believe Wilson is an investor in Disqus.

But, I do find it amusing that there is a little Indochinese style war going on here between TechStars and YC, with proxies in the form of Intense Debate and Disqus. I dunno how far the analogy goes, but I suspect that whichever one plays most effectively by guerilla rules will be the winner.

I have had some issues with IntenseDebate. They use a script which causes IE to slow down. IE detects it and asks if I want to continue running the script. Has anyone else seen this with Disqus or IntenseDebate?

Another issue is that IntenseDebate loads (script) AFTER TypePad has already displayed its comment system. My blog is hosted on TypePad. After a few seconds IntenseDebate loads and replaces the TypePad comment box. Has anyone else seen that?

Thanks

Have either/both of these solved the Googlejuice problem? e.g. searches find your comments and the click leads the searcher to a site other than your blog. This is one of our hesitations in going this route, even though Disqus is really awesome to use.

Do any of these schemes allow me to federate comments with other blogs? I'd like to be sharing comment feeds with the other blogs in my space.

Fred Wilson FTW.