Keeping Track of Conversations
There are amazing conversations going on in the Web 2.0 world. Everybody agrees that it is hard to keep up with everything even to the point that keeping up is becoming a full time job. RSS is the best thing since sliced bread to gain a little advantage and stay informed once there are updates. No doubt about that…
…but as time passes my RSS reader (Google Reader) is getting overcrowded with 168 subscriptions and counting. I am sure that I am not the only one feeling that way, nor the one with the highest number of subscriptions. Many times I feel overwhelmed and have the feeling that some of the good conversations are falling through the cracks.
I have started keeping track of the conversations that I am interested in with a separate folder in Google Reader named creatively “Conversations”.
Any discussion on a Ning network automatically has an RSS button at the end of the page that invites you to subscribe to the discussion via RSS. I simply subscribe and add the feed to my “Conversation” folder.
Most blog sites have two different RSS feeds available. One for the posts and another for the comments. That Comment RSS delivers ALL comments to the blog, not only comments to a specific conversation. Some blogs are now giving you the option to be notified of a follow up comment via e-mail. That will depend on what blogging platform (Blogger, Worldpress, etc. ), theme and plugins you might be using if this option appears for your readers.
I had to add the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin to my blog in order to receive one of the the following choices on the bottom of each comment box.
(PS. If you are logged in as the administrator of the blog post, you will not see this option box in your browser. Log out as admin and refresh your browser to see it)
If you are a blogger and do not have an option for your readers to subscribe easily to a specific conversation, please consider adding that in order to make it easier for the rest of us to keep up with a good thread.
I am still on the hunt of a good plugin to be able to create an RSS feed of the comments for a specific post. Let me know if you are using one for your WordPress blog.
Have you checked out cocomment.com…It might do what you are looking for.
Being relatively new to the conversation side of the blog world. I completely agree that keeping track of conversations is overwhelming. I started using Bloglines to keep track of the blogs I subscribe too. There have also been many occasions that I read a blog posting, which I discovered through Twitter on blogs that I don’t subscribe to. Lately, I have skimmed so many good blog posting on the fly, that when I want to revisit them to learn more or to refer to them in my own blog postings I forget where they originated from.