There seem to be a couple major schools of thought on this: those for tool and app innovation, and those in favor of culture and community… It’s as if we all recognize that our conversation and publishing tools need openness and freedom from constraints to innovate, and yet as users we’re all suffering from fragmentation. It’s getting harder to make the signal out against all the noise, and noise levels are increasing due to the fact that we’re all using amplifiers, we’ve got our gain cranked up to 11, and the walls (when they exist) are full of holes big enough to drive an equipment truck through.

For example, these schools seem to come down on opposing sides of the following major elements of any conversation/publishing tool:

(these are off the cuff)

Disaggregation
For: is good for technical progress and innovation
Against: fragments the conversation space

Flow
For: conversation needs less structure and faster throughput to work
Against: all talk all the time creates even more redundancy if it’s not given a common place to happen in

Structure
For: structured content makes the web more useful
Against: conversation dislikes structure

Audiences
For: the speaker should address himself to his audience (blogs)
Against: the listeners should choose who they want to listen to (twitter)

Synchrony
For: slow conversation like twitter, or chat, IM, etc are best for ongoing communication
Against: the web makes discontinuous communication easy to follow after the fact — so why ask users to pay attention when they have other things to do

One thing I’d like to know more of — how open is the social marketer to conversation, really? Because as long as conversation tools are used for the purpose of posting/distributing, there’s the strong possibility of user resistance, if not banner-wielding protest…

My point is that not all forms are at the same level and maybe it’s OK to miss some segments of the conversation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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