The Broken Conversation
You write a blog post. You tweet about it. It gets posted to your FriendFeed profile. You share it via Facebook. You save it to del.icio.us.
Your friends, followers and colleagues comment on the blog.
Or they say something nice via Twitter (where a conversation related to your post ensues).
Or, they comment directly via your FriendFeed profile. Or they comment on your Facebook post.
Or they save the post to their own del.icio.us account and add a comment there.
Yes, you’re highly connected with your audience. Yes, it’s cool that each of your readers can view and respond in the social media outlet of their choice.
But as a result, the conversation is broken. It’s not threaded. It’s discontinuous: lacking sequence and coherence.
Is this a problem? I dunno. But I do think it’s problem for the “ideal” of social media: in a fractured commentsphere, individual voices can be too easily discounted or simply lost.
(Further, the need to spread out far & wide to find and respond to these farflung voices leads to the ever-looming Attention Crash!)
It gets worse when you consider that there are Social Media Monitoring vendors like Radian6, Buzzmetrics, etc. who may judge a bloggers’ level of importance & engagement by evaluating the comment threads that follow each post. If those comment streams are happening in Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., I doubt it’s being captured and evaluated by the measurement gurus – thus undervaluing many bloggers’ influence (and certainly discounting their level of “engagement”).
I don’t have an answer; it’s for greater minds than mine. Do you have the answer? Maybe Dave Winer has the answer?
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If more of these networks supported Pingbacks, you could use them as a “carrier signal” to deliver the commentary into the formal comment stream of the blogpost. The blog essentially becomes an aggregator for the fragments of commentary.
Develop a microformat for the enclosure, and some Wordpress genius will have a plugin to auto-insert them into the comment stream by Wednesday.
Todd–thought about commenting on Facebook, but…
This looks like the kernel of an idea for the next great web 2.0 application–one that manages comments across ALL platforms.
The challenge would be to get the other platforms to play along–and that’s a BIG challenge. FB is notorious for not sharing its content.
A couple of different apps are out there to manage comments–but I don’t think they do much outside of the verious blog platforms. They are http://www.intensedebate.com/ and http://disqus.com/.
Todd,
It’s great to have profiles on all those social networking sites in order to be able to CONNECT with people. But when it comes to blogging, your blog should be the place for the conversation to unfold. This is when the snowball effect happens – the content builds upon itself. If someone says something interesting about your blog post, ask them to write a comment on your blog. It would be as easy as copy-and-paste.
Todd,
Great topic. Disjointed storytelling.
Would some combination of pulling tweets into your blog like this (http://www.andreavascellari.com/blog/?p=385) work? You may want to figure out how to parse subjects so you don’t get every tweet directed to each page.
The bigger picture, of course, is how to restructure these broken conversations into a single narrative that can display directly in the comments field. Is there a way to populate blog comments with quotables?
ahg3
Todd,
Ironically, might I point out that there’s a pretty intelligent conversation taking place within this post’s comments section?
Still, to tie in your point – how do we know this isn’t being/hasn’t been/will be discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere?
I find myself monitoring Twitter more and more for fear that if I don’t, I’ll be missing out on some important conversations.
Great point, Todd – very thought provoking.
Pamela
Todd,
What a great post that illustrates one of the biggest struggles in blogging today. And beyond the Tweeting and everything else you subscribe is the complication when a post from your blog is syndicated (with permission, of course) elsewhere. The connectivity with multiple audience streams is great, but it’s hard to engage conversations on the same topic in multiple places and it’s often frustrating to know how the conversations could really benefit from each other!
It will be interesting to see how this issue progresses and whether it helps evolve or ends up devolving the relationship-building power of blogging.
I agree with the issues, but seeing as there isn’t a killer app, what to do?
Do we each take responsibility to put the pieces of the conversation where they can be followed or continue to do what’s convenient for ourselves? Maybe post a link to that twitter, utterz, or other responses in the comments following the post? A bit time consuming but then there is no discontinuation of the conversation.
I’m a big fan of reading blogs in Google Reader so I *will* comment. I might take the time to click on a link in Twitter to read a post if I have a moment but always try to comment where I believe the blogger will find most useful.
I read another aspect of this topic over the weekend at Louisgray.com (http://is.gd/5DE) who took it a step further, asking if moving content into those ‘fractured’ places was actually violating the rights of the content creator.
My take is that we getting too close to what we do. The point that bloggers like to bring up about copyright is that you can’t copyright ideas.
I’m going to stretch that idea to conversations. You can ‘own’ the words you use to write a blog post but you can’t control the conversation. It’s not ‘your’ conversation any more than the ideas.
Now, that doesn’t answer the practical point of being involved in the discussions about what you wrote. I know most bloggers would want to stay involved in whatever conversations are sparked by their posts. To answer that concern, I agree with Ike. We don’t need additional services to aggregate content, we need some kind of underlying architecture that will ping back to the blog and let the individual aggregate their own content.
John, bless you. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only person who could see my comment.
I understand how it would be frustrating to keep track of the conversation in different mediums. But, do professional/academic gurus need to track what is being said in Facebook (other than a social case study?) like they would on a serious forum?
My point is that not all forms are at the same level and maybe it’s OK to miss some segments of the conversation.