Last July, we covered the initial debut of JS-Kit’s Echo, a real-time commenting system.This morning during a media conference call, the CEO Khris Loux announced that in light of the success of the product (and likely because many people haven’t liked the JS-Kit name for years), they are rebranding the entire company as Echo.

During the call the company also detailed the first batch of customers it has signed up for the product. These include CBS/CNet, Discovery Channel, Dow Jones Local Media Group, Hearst Digital News, The Press Enterprise, CanWest, Technorati, and KQED. Loux says that while Echo has several hundred thousand sites on the platform, as much as 99% of the traffic comes from its top dozen partners, which drive between 10-20 million uniques a month.

Echo is meant to help content sites steer the ‘conversation’ back to their blogs and news sites. As more people turn to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, their comments can become disconnected from the original piece of content (in other words, if I read a blog post, I won’t see comments people have left about it on Twitter). Echo tries to aggregate these comments and display them beneath the original post in real-time.