When I first started blogging, I ended up engaged in some conversations with fellow bloggers that never really went anywhere because the blog to blog format didn't really accomodate two way communication very easily. Facebook's walls are the perfect mechanism for this, but I don't want to have to friend everyone or make my profile public to have these conversations read more widely.
I'm sure there's a half-way house out there for this...
Thursday, 21 April 2011
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8 comments:
It's called Twitter. ;)
I would agree with you but there are not enough characters to write a rep
This was the reason for trackbacks, and they are still much more effective than twitter / facebook as they can give your readers and contributors to the discussion a way to follow the discussion from data silo to data silo. Unfortunately there dosn't seem to be a no-brainer way to automatically make trackbacks. If it's blogger to blogger it's fine (and called backlinks), if it's wordpress to wordpress it's fine.
I have played around with echo before it became a paid service and it attempted to seek out any other references to a post and include them as a reference. In theory it's the exact solution needed, but I've never seen it work 100% either. Might have to see if they have any example sites using it effectively now.
Last time I checked, Facebook and Twitter are resisting methods of trackbacks to keep the conversation alive beyond their own data silos, so I'd be hesitant to move all conversations to either one (unless you want to continually copy/paste like the previous article).
VRBones: Trackbacks don't include comments as far as I was aware, which is what I'm suggesting: interleaving the conversation after the blog post between multiple sites. The specific example here is Ben Abraham's and my reactions to Portal 2, and how to preserve the dialog between multiple blogs on some or all of them.
Yeah, it's usually "my place or your place" for the comments, but trackbacks do give the opportunity for the conversation to travel, and have multiple sites contribute to the conversation with enough space for adequate reflection. The big failing is the lack of autonomy, which largely leaves trackbacks neglected and misused.
I was really hoping that wave would have been the catchall for conversations and comments, but it never got that far (all it needed was RSS sync and the willingness of websites to embed it as the comment system). Echo is possibly the closest to what you're after, but it still just helps bring the conversation back together rather than giving an easy traversal of where the conversation is spreading over the net.
I've had really good conversations on Google Buzz, believe it or not. There's a core of us game dev/writer/critic folks who use it and it's been great for me.
For example, the entirety of this blog post was a contribution I made to a thread:
http://tinysubversions.com/2011/01/soap-opera/
--which I then posted to my blog upon realizing it would stand alone with some minor tweaks.
If you're interested I can give you a list of people you might want to follow.
Darius: That'd be super. If it's public knowledge, blog it, if it is private, drop me an email at andrewdoull@gmail.com
If you really want to leverage Facebook, you might consider their new commenting system, which lets you integrate your blog comments with the Facebook wall posts you're mentioning above. (Here's a link to what look like pretty simple instructions: http://www.webascender.com/Blog/ID/269/How-to-Add-Facebook-Comments-to-My-Website .) I have yet to do it at thelastweblog.com, but I'm planning to. (Maybe today! :)
If having your Facebook profile be private is stopping you, I'd recommend reconsidering that decision, as your Facebook connections can be a good source of small-scale early marketing. You just published your email address here, after all!
Darius, I would be interested to see if I've missed anyone on your list as well: themetaverse@gmail.com
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