Comment Challenge: Where to comment?

Hi, Kevin,

In the past I’d totally agree with you that keeping comments on one’s blog was the way to go, but as I started to experiment with different ways to bring conversations together, I’ve been a fan of the writingmatrix concept of distributed conversations which we successfully tested on a workshop on blogging 4 educators. In this post by one of our co-moderators, you’ll see her account of keeping track of these distributed conversations via technorati tags. The idea is that you create a unique tag for a specific conversation you want to see develop and others joining the conversations would just tag it with this unique tag and every blog post would be aggregated in technorati. Fun! We had one of the activities in the group called “5 things you don’t know about me”, and the conversations developed from it were just great.

Trackback is also interesting because you can develop your idea better in a blog post, but still dialoguing with the person that sparked the interest to write the blog post.

Consider how we’re aggregating conversations using the Cocomment feature, as well. So, I guess conversations on a blog simply don’t take one path, they can take as many as bloggers creativity. And that’s the beauty of it! If you think of memes being created all the time, they encourage conversations and the creation of just incredible online posts, artifacts, for example.

Hi, kevin,

The interesting thing about it? I was skeptical at first when Vance Stevens told me about the writingmatrix concept, but once you start using it, it’s just so much fun! The good thing is that it’s really simple for students, for example, as they just need to learn how to tag properly. The only trick thing in the technorati search is to use the search “with any authority” because then technorati will not look only for the popular blogs with lots of traffic.

If you have any questions about it, we can keep sharing on it, but I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the concept of distributed conversations.

I’ve been really expanding my views on commenting lately. We can’t be restricted to the comment box. Otherwise, we might become frustrated as there are so many other ways to enhance conversations. Twitter, for example, is another space for comments and feedback, isn’t it?

Dear Sue and Kevin.

You’re right, Twitter is somewhat chaotic, disjointed, but conversations happen there all the time, and we’re even invited to eavesdrop! It is certainly another means of establishing conversations, but in a very specific mode. I don’t think we could compare it to a blog post in which we’re really reflecting, discussing, analyzing, speaking up our minds, but it’s certainly another means by which we’re connecting. Many times, we reply immediately back to a tweet, we talk to others, we reply to queries in that fraction of time constrained by 140 words. Sometimes we get comments on out blog post because someone twitted about it, so if it’s not possible to really expand our ideas there, it can be, at least, where they start!

I’m really enjoying the conversation here.

By the way, Kevin, very interesting Twitter poem! Thanks for sharing.

I’m part of an online group of educators, and one way we found to keep the conversations and ideas being twitted in the group is by using crowdstatus. Have you two heard of it? At least, it makes the group tweets more visual. Interesting. The group has been discussed that it’s a great tool to use with a group of students.
http://crowdstatus.com/webheadsinactioncrowd.aspx