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My Answer To The Conversation Fragmentation Conundrum

There’s been a lot of talk lately about conversation and comment fragmentation, especially since Friendfeed.com, the new darling of Web2.0, has been gaining traction. On Friendfeed, we sign up, plug in our own feeds and ‘friend’ others whose feeds we like. But what makes the service really unique is the more social aspects of it. We can also manually post and link to items and even comment on those items right within Friendfeed itself.

And that’s what has a lot of people buzzing. If a member of Friendfeed posts a link to a blog post from someone who’s not a member and it sparks a big discussion within Friendfeed itself, that discussion is not happening at the point of origin, the non-member’s blog post itself.

This conversation fragmentation is becoming more and more widespread. For instance, if a link to your post makes it onto Digg.com or Reddit.com, or even Stumbleupon.com or Twitter, conversations can take place ‘as a result’ of your post without there ever being a single comment left on the post itself.

This has bloggers split into two different camps. On the one hand, some bloggers think the conversation should only take place at the point of origin and that fragmentation is a bad thing, traffic wise and ultimately financially. If people aren’t coming to your blog, that’s less traffic, less pageviews and less ad impressions = less revenue for the blogger. In fact, some bloggers look at this as the beginning of the end of professional blogging.

The Pro-fragmentation camp is all for as many conversations about the content in as many different places online as possible and feel that it’s not the end of professional blogging, but a natural progression of social networking and maybe even another layer of syndication of the content that leads to more exposure for the author.

I’m in the pro-fragmentation camp, but on the fringe, so to speak. I believe that - let people talk and comment all they want, wherever they want. Otherwise the conversation is stiffled, but aggregate and archive all those conversations back at the point of origin.

That’s why I’ve used Disqus as my new commenting system here on this blog - so that the conversation can take place in more than one place at a time. It’s also why I’ve installed the Friendfeed plugin - so that any comments on my links fed into friendfeed are automatically pulled back to the original post as well.

Now, I’m also thinking that with some creative coding and a case or two of Redbull, this could be taken to th next level - a discovery plugin, or techmeme-like web service that would automatically find your links on sites like twitter, reddit, digg, friendfeed, etc., anywhere where a conversation can be pieced together, and pull those conversations back into the comments section below your blog posts.

Not only would this concept allow you to discover and take part in conversations about your content happening elsewhere, but it would allow any visitors to the blog to see and take part in those conversations as well, even though they may never have known about them otherwise. Not to mention the fact that it adds to your own content on your blog too.

Collect the fragments and piece them back together for everybody’s benefit.

Posted: Thu 5.29.08 @ 7:01am EST by Paul Short