17 comments

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  Louis Gray

  1 year ago

  With time, I believe this topic of "fragmented conversations" will go away. I feel like it's almost everything I've been talking about for two full months. :-)
  
  I like all these new approaches to gathering and sharing information. I'm already big time on the record in favor of FriendFeed and Shyftr and any other tool that lets you build a community and conversation around content. I was excited to see Paul Buchheit publicly mention he'd reached out to Disqus. That's the first time I'd seen that acknowledged.
  
  The best thing we can do is continue to participate, and trust the teams working on the innovation. They're all doing a great job and listening. I'm enjoying it. The worst thing we can do is get entrenched and demand that things be a certain way - an inflexible way, and make it so we're not part of the conversation at all.
  
  Looking forward to much much more.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  Totally agree, Louis.
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  CyndyA

  1 year ago

  Well, sure, Matthew, but you, and Fred, and Louis, all have day jobs that pay the bills. Some of us don't get paid in comments, and chasing the fragmented conversations around gets tiring.
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  Robert Seidman

  1 year ago

  Cyndy, if you're paid based on how many people read your posts, I think there's enough data to support all the fragmented conversations do generate more page views than you'd get without them.
  
  I understand the desire to participate in the conversations, but desire != obligation.
  
  I'd bet Mike Arrington and Arianna Huffington desire to be a part of any conversations their posts start, but not so much that they'd rather have 10x-100x less traffic so that it was humanly possible!
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  CyndyA

  1 year ago

  I'm not current at any gig that pays per page view, but I know many are (the Gawker writers get a base plus pageview bonus, for instance). The idea that FriendFeed is driving all this incredible traffic, however, isn't the case, or at least we haven't experienced it. Svetlana noted it earlier this week; on a FF post with something like 30 likes, only 20 referrals came through from FF. In other words, people are "liking" something in some cases without ever reading the article, which I thought was strange. I understand the logical forking of conversation, so I'd assume that maybe people were saying they liked the conversation, but overall, unless something is seriously mainstream to the point of near universal adoption, I don't think it's ever going to drive the sort of traffic that Google, etc. drive.
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  frederic

  1 year ago

  I like that point of view. I tend to think of comments and 'likes' on FriendFeed as applause for bloggers.
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  howardlindzon

  1 year ago

  the friendfeed plug in is quite interesting. thx matthew.
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  MikeonTV

  1 year ago

  However some of us still comment because of the passion for web 2.0!
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  ianbetteridge

  1 year ago

  It's worth remembering that FriendFeed actually fragments comments even within itself. If I reshare a link from someone, that's another comment thread spun out. If I share something that someone else has shared, there's no internal aggregation of comments.
  
  That's one of the reasons that I suspect FriendFeed is actually weaker in the long term than most people think. Even now, with a relatively small user-base, the number of places to discuss something just on FriendFeed is essentially unmanageable. As it grows, it will be almost impossible to "find where the action is", so people will just aggregate around things posted by the likes of Scoble - which will turn FriendFeed into yet another platform for domination by the A-list.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  I have to say that's one of my main peeves with FriendFeed, actually
  -- every time someone shares something from Google Reader, or posts it
  to Twitter or shares it in some other way, it becomes a new instance
  of that item and comments aggregate in different places. I wish FF
  could pull those items together.
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  BrianSullivan

  1 year ago

  I would like to propose an amendment to "Bloggers get paid in comments". I would propose "Bloggers get paid in conversation" is a better statement. What is happening is a temporarily it is more difficult to follow the conversation (like before trackbacks and comments system supported blogs).
  
  I agree with Louis the problem is temporary.
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  Sprague D

  1 year ago

  I've written about the benefit to bloggers from increased "share of voice" that may make up for the loss of value from from fragmented conversations -- but there is still the issue of brands being "subsumed" by other brands...
  
  http://www.ratdiary.com/2008/05/19/the-brand-ca...
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  antje wilsch

  1 year ago

  You and I have been chatting about this a little bit. I still read my paper every single day. I also read the news online (and as the AP becomes more and more filler) I'll find I've already read many of the articles.
  
  So with one foot in each world (and I prefer Huffington's ménage à trois idea of journalism-blogger-reader better) one of the things I"m finding irks me is that it's nearly impossible to get to an individual AP writer. They bury their contact information. On the flip side, bloggers who never comment on their own posts or post with mostly negative comments (ie only comment on trolls) I also find myself reading less.
  
  I am tending towards idea that a blog post is the beginning of the discussion / conversation (albeit usually short lived) vs. a newspaper article that I read and am usually finished with by the end (ie I have no expectation of anything further) whereas a blog post is a starting point.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  I think that's an excellent way of putting it, Antje -- so much
  traditional media (including that at my own paper) is seen as an end
  point rather than a starting point. The primary benefit of online
  media of any kind, blogs or whatever, is that it is a beginning of
  something, and that comments and responses and links make up something
  much larger (and hopefully better) than the original thing.
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  michael lamb

  1 year ago

  Can make the blogger's life tough because there is an expectation of a reply [no reply needed here ;) ]
  
  Right now I'm involved working with writers on human interest stories, and it's *really* tough to get them to understand that they need to do this - to interact with their users. They just want to publish and be done with it. They truly feel like this is extra "work" they didn't agree to/ sign on for and don't yet get the dynamicsm you mention, how it can grow. They want to leave this to the marketing folks only, but that's not what the users want. It's going to take some work to change this mindset as "news" (in whatever form) often being a beginning rather than an end product.
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  Joe Sherrod

  1 year ago

  Bloggers who are against their blog being discussed outside the blog clearly do not want the free advertising. These idiots should read up on grassroots marketing 101.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  I don't think it's that they're against their blog posts being
  discussed outside their own blog, Joe -- I think most of them would
  just like an easier way to find out when that's happening so they can
  take part in the discussion (or at least know about it), which I can
  sympathize with.
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