Much of the blog content produced is conversational in its nature – it’s one blogger linking to and making comment on the content provided by another blogger.
But are we providing the tools to enable a true conversation? Is it possible to see all of the elements of a conversation? Who else is involved in the conversation? Who has left the conversation and gone off to speak to someone more interesting?
I think that’s the point Scoble was getting at when he wrote:
I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)
What else would you like to see your blog tool tell you?
So here I am continuing the conversation and telling Scoble what I would like from my blog tools, but how does he know I’ve continued the conversation? Well he knows that I have continued the conversation because of the link above; but he would find it difficult to know that Drew has also added to the conversation because Drew’s link comes in the form of a comment on my original post. Unless Scoble visits my site he can’t see the comments and because he uses an aggregator, like I do, he isn’t likely to do that. Likewise, I find it difficult to see the people who have continued the conversation with Scoble. I have to go and visit his site to know that there are comments there; I would have to do some searching to find out who else has linked to his article; and then I would have to do the same thing again at the next tier of the conversation.
Getting all of this information together to see the whole conversation is not impossible today but it’s way too much like hard work. Because it’s too much like hard-work we don’t actually get the value from the conversation that we should and current search engines don’t actually help here. Search engines don’t rank information on the basis of it’s real true value (because that’s different for each individual), they rank it on the basis of how popular it is. Popularity can mean that something is good, but it’s only one dimension. Most artists that we now regard as masters even geniuses weren’t popular in their own time. We need to have tools that allow us to see the whole conversation so that we can find those pearls of wisdom that come from the person who’s brain has just put together a thought that would amaze us all, if only we knew it existed.
It’s as if all of the links are there, but that we haven’t quite the tools that help us to see it. Perhaps it’s time I got into coding again, it’s been a very long time and I’m not sure how transferable my Cobol skills are. Perhaps I should stick to being an ideas man.
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Graham Chastney 
Actually, when a site is talking about something interesting I do visit in a browser to see the rest of the comments. That’s an interesting point, by the way, and speaks ill of those who only have partial text feeds (I’m far less likely to read those posts at all, much less get interested in them).
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It is not the most efficient use of time and resources but I try to at least track comments for a bit when I join in a conversation. Usually the conversation dies or my browser crashes eventually.
It is hard to track the whole breadth of the conversation though, as you said, because it can just go so many places.
Heck part of the problem may be full text feeds, they let the conversation be more open so more people may participate but do not really encourage keeping a conversation in one place.
I could find an item on a aggregated feed and not even know where the original was from (easily tracked down but not the point) then I post on my site because they said something that prompted me to respond. Sure I’ll ping them and give source where I can, but now I am over here and they are over there.
If they don’t check their pingbacks they won’t even know I responded. If I were important (read: generate lots of traffic, in this case) I could “start” a whole conversation. This conversation may take place all on my site and the person who inspired it won’t even see it.
Heck it used to happen alot on scoble’s blog (it may still, does he still have comments? I haven’t really checked anything but his feed since he moved to wordpress.com).
Well I’d love to see a workable solution, but there are alot of parties that would have to get together most likely.
-Drew
(someone should suggest OPML, I hear that works wonders for collaborative feed goodness)
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I supose that the two of you (Drew and Scoble) kind of prove my point, you both disagree about the answer to the problem. We don’t have a conversation about it, we kind of walk around the issue, assumng it’s worth resolving we could do with tools that actually take us a bit further than where we are today.
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I’d love to have a conversation about it. My disagreement with Scoble was more of the this “speaks ill” of partial feeds. The problem exists because of the decentralized nature of the internet. The problem is compounded by the fact that with a full feed people can discuss at length and never really see the origin.
The problem would still be there with partial feeds. However, since alot of people are lazy, less conversations would start.
I have a full feed, I like full feeds, I just don’t see this problem as a reason to adopt full feeds. Everyone running a full feed won’t have much of an effect on solving the problem.
We need something like a new level of trackbacks. Like I said, maybe the work could be done in OPML. Where your comments are kept in an opml file and comments on posts trackbacked to your post would be a subdirectory of your ompl, and so on.
I am saying this without much behind it though. I have heard a little about OPML and this is how I have understood it too work. However it hasn’t really been something I looked deeply into, so I could be looking at this all wrong.
-Drew
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