Gravatar was a great service, it helped commentators to express themselves through avatars on blog comments. It quickly became popular with over 90,000 accounts and 4.5 billion images served, but it has been dead for quite sometimes now.
Thesedays, bloggers consider removing Gravatar’s because they don’t work resulting in slow pageloads. So I went looking for an alternative.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog which recently got converted from a blog statistics service to a social network has a feature which allows Wordpress and MoveableType users to show MyBlogLog avatar next to comments. This one works directly without any code insertion, Just Edit your Blog Settings and enable Faces on Comments. It’ll take about 24 hours to reflect this change on your blog. The only disadvantage is that we don’t have much control over the look and feel of these avatars.
Pavatar
Pavatar is the short form of Personal Avatar. It was born out of the desperation of Gravatar’s unreliability. I haven’t tried it yet, but they surely look promising. They even have Wordpress Plugin to make this easier for you
Other alternatives include Favatars and Comvatars which provide on-site avatar for your commentators. Majority of folks don’t prefer this one, but go ahead and give it a try.

wrote, on December 14th, 2006
Just written a plugin for using MyBloglog like gravatar in wordpress comments…
Take a look at my blog!!!
wrote, on December 14th, 2006
Napolux: Do they have a code just for showing Avatars on blog comments ?
I thought it comes along with the tracker script
wrote, on December 14th, 2006
They have. But you need to activate it in your mybloglog profile, and wait until staff let you use it. (Just waited 2 months)
There’s no need with my plugin…
wrote, on December 14th, 2006
Personally i dont like Gravatars.It was creating a problem.Mybloglog is pretty good.I am using it now.Ths for reminding me back
wrote, on February 28th, 2007
[...] piece of cake is already eaten by MyBlogLog and other similar services. I think, Gravatar will have to fight their way back into blogs. As a blogger, if you have already [...]