Lilia Efimova has a great post about the dynamics of comments and conversations in Weblogs.
Conversations are different from publishing, they require listening to others, require investment of attention and energy. My morning check is my way to find out who is talking to me and what they are saying. I don’t do it to find our how famous I am, this is just a very human thirst for a feedback and my respect to those who spend time answering my questions, finding flaws in my arguments or developing my ideas in new directions… So, coming to my original question. I guess some of our conversations die because we do not spend enough energy listening and replying back. In this respect weblog conversations are not much different from all other conversations.
In the post she talks about using Technorati extensively to find other people who are linking and continuing the conversations that she either starts or adds to on her site. And she alludes to her other efforts to find those who are reading and commenting about her posts. Sounds similar to what I’ve been doing.
But to be honest, I hardly ever use Technorati. So I decided to dive into it a bit more today to see if there were some others out there linking and talking that weren’t showing up on my logs or in trackback (which doesn’t seem to catch most anyway.) Cool thing is I found at least 10 posts that I didn’t know about that were linking back here, and some of it was pretty interesting. It’s not something to add to the list of requirements for EdCMS, but it would be nice if there was a better way of tracking the important conversations that Lilia refers to.
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