From [RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] and [RatcliffeBlog -- Social and Political], regarding online conversations:
The irony of blogging is that it makes it harder to respond, because it is hard to find every reference to my comments; they used to come to my email inbox, but now they are spread all over. The referrer log doesn't cut it, because it relies on actual linking taking place, and many times comments are not linked.
If we want a dialog, we need an easier way to track the spread of ideas we engender/ignited/tossed out. Backlinking is effective, but requires discipline by bloggers or the trail quickly disappears. (See this excellent posting about backlinking by Denise Howell.) Google still lags behind the actual state of the Web, so it isn't up to the challenge, yet. A kind of Reverse RSS with a Google-driven context engine that ties a blogger's work to other items that might have a relation to it, from their day job to articles they wrote years before on mailing lists, is what I am thinking....
Wow. So much to think about these past few days, all relating to how one might follow the path of a conversation around the web. Denise Howell started it all here with the first link in my aggregator to David Gallagher's article in the MIT Technology Review.
A reverse news aggregator could be particularly interesting from the author's perspective, but Rick Klau commented on TrackBack here:
TrackBack is less for the writer than it is for the reader. In a relatively painless way, TrackBack (or some other iteration that tries to do the same thing) will connect the dots for the readers - so that they may see threads of discussions occurring across numerous sites.
Rick continued by mentioning that writers have the ability to monitor their site statistics or referral logs (and here's where that ability to link directly to a piece of text, rather than an entire post, would be useful). Referral logs in Radio, though, seem to show only sites with links that readers have followed; I determined this when I noticed that some links in my referrer logs reappeared multiple times. It follows that if someone links to me, but no one follows the link, I will be unaware of the conversation. The comments feature in Radio has the potential to create this sort of "back link," though; I can add to my blog (as I've done here) and then comment on each of the blogs I've quoted, including a link back here. Readers will see that I've attempted to continue the conversation, and the writer (to the extent that she watches the comments on her site) will see it as well. Sort of a manual "TrackBack:" slightly self-serving, perhaps, in a hey-dad-look-come-pay-attention-to-me sort of way, but that is another issue.
It does require that the writer monitor the comments on their site (and, in the case of Radio, not live entirely on their local machine), but TrackBack presumably has the same requirement. It is almost a courtesy note, a cyber "calling card" (a la Jane Austen, not AT&T)--hey, I've linked to you, you might want to know about it.
