We’ve been focusing a lot lately on the importance of community. When we talk about community, we think of it in two ways — online and offline. Offline, you might be in a weekend biking club, while online you’re a closet hardcore Robert Pattinson fan. So where do you go to bridge the gap? Online, where you can find fellow geeks of every flavor: foodies, gamers, fashionistas, mommies — the list goes on and on. But while you can find satisfaction in one of these two communities, these online and offline interests still remain separate. What can you do to unite the two?

Disqus recently convened a panel of four women at BlogHer ’13 to talk about building community, return visits, and monetization through comments. These four accomplished bloggers — Danielle Smith, Lindsay Ferrier, Fadra Nally, and Lizz Porter — shared their wisdom, and what follows are 5 key takeaways that any blogger can put to use for building a stronger community.

When we decided to put a new face on Disqus.com, we knew we wanted to show some love to the sites that use Disqus and use it well. Destructoid was an obvious match. Destructoid isn’t your average gaming site (in the past they’ve been described as “the ‘uncle that tells dirty jokes to kids’ kind of gaming site”), and one of the things that sets them apart is their unique and vibrant community. Niero Gonzalez is the founder of Destructoid and started the site in 2006 as his personal blog.

One of the great things about Disqus is the diversity of conversations, sites and people across our network. On any given day, there are 120 million people connecting to Disqus to be part of discussions covering all topics imaginable. Increasingly, people are finding new stuff to talk about by connecting with other commenters. So over the past year, we’ve been building ways that make it easier for you to find and follow people on Disqus who may help you discover new communities. In the last couple of months, we released improvements to profiles, My Disqus and digest emails to make it easier to discover new discussions across Disqus. With the continued goal of helping you discover interesting content, we’re making it even easier to find and follow interesting Disqus users on your favorite communities. Today, we’re announcing the public release of three new features: upvoting visibility, finding Disqus friends on Facebook and private activity.

Last Thursday, May 16th, we shipped our first Go project into production.

Last month, Disqus achieved a significant milestone: our network hit a billion monthly unique visitors. No matter how you slice it, it puts Disqus in a select category of ubiquitous web services that millions of people use everyday.

We are excited today to announce Disqus AudienceSync: a seamless way for users to port their Disqus profile to publisher sites with one or two clicks. As reported by Adweek, Disqus follows similar approaches used by Facebook and Google+ and is the first discussion platform on the web to offer this technology.

One of the most common questions asked of Disqus around the world is one I asked myself soon after joining: when will Disqus be available in my language? I answered that question for my own native Turkish by diving into the code and adding that language myself. But not everyone works at Disqus(but you can!) and our previous work at supporting languages could not sufficiently scale to support the global demand for Disqus. So today, we’re announcing the Disqus Translation Community: the tools and support for you to bring Disqus to your country in your language.

We’re excited to announce the release of Disqus Digest emails.

Ever wonder what it is like to move to a foreign country, one with a completely different language, culture, sense of fashion, musical styles, and more? EatYourKimchi is a site started by Simon and Martina, who have documented and blogged about their lives as foreigners in South Korea. They talk about music, restaurants, shopping, and other everyday experiences with a unique South Korean twist. I reached out to Simon and Martina to ask them more about their ventures, the community they have created, and the fans of their site.

When we first started talking about the soon-to-be-launched Disqus 2012, we highlighted discovery as one of the driving themes behind the new platform: