Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about the fragmentation of conversation. It was a topic that came up a lot last week. I’m not going to judge whether that fragmentation is a good or a bad thing, but it does exist. It means it’s easier to miss out on the conversation. So it’s important to know where to look to find that discussion.

Took me a while to realise quite how fragmented the conversation on blog pieces has become. It wasn’t until I did a little bit of delving and searching online that I discovered how widespread the comments on a couple of my blog pieces were. But obviously I want to know what people are saying about what I write.

And I also want to be able to find other conversations and material about topics I’m interested in. I don’t want to miss out on that great blog post with a new theory on the identity of the fifth Cylon (…however unlike a new theory on this is).

To focus on the topic, start searching Friendfeed

Searching for new material on a particular topic is easy with Friendfeed. For the purposes of this search we’re ignoring your friends, ignoring the rooms you’re a member of. We’re going to focus on Friendfeeds often underused public feed.

Thepublic feed includes everything that any member of Friendfeed has tagged, shared or commented on. And it’s entirely searchable. I can check to see all the Friendfeed activity about my “fifth Cylon” interest. The search will include new blog posts, Friendfeed messages, tagged sites on the likes of StumbleUpon, and Friendfeed discussions.

The Friendfeed search brings up everything. What it doesn’t do is let you focus purely on the conversation. You can’t search just to see the comments that revolve around particular blog posts or Friendfeed submissions. The only comments you’ll see are the ones specifically made on Friendfeed.

So when you want to join the conversation, search Yacktrack

Yacktrack is a little work of genius. It’s designed to cater for the fragmentation of comments. Its simple search interface lets you see all the discussion about particular terms or articles. Those comments might be on Friendfeed, on a blog itself, Disqus, even StumbleUpon reviews. Yacktrack will pull them all together for you to look at.

For a developing service which is “still technically a beta release” it seems stable and very functional. You can keep up with its development at regulargeek.com.

It has two specific ways to search, which should give you all the functionality you need. You can search by the URL of a particular blog post. So if you want to see the wider discussion on an article you wrote, just post the URL here. Or you can search for online chatter about a particular term, such as “fifth cylon”.

It wasn’t until I first used Yacktrack that I realised just how much discussion about my own material I was missing. I’d seen Friendfeed discussions, but only if they were linked to people I already followed. With Yacktrack I discovered comment and debate on my blog posts spread far more widely, and that let me contribute to those debates.

The main service that Yacktrack doesn’t cover is Twitter. I think that’s a good thing. Yacktrack is about searching and finding conversational threads. Twitter is more about individual comments than conversation. If you want to search that service particularly then there’s always Summize.

Be prepared for cross-over

Using both of these services is of course going to give you some duplicate information. Most particularly it’s going to duplicate the Friendfeed conversations. You’ll see them on both searches.

In fact using Yacktrack highlights just how much Friendfeed has become a central hub of conversation. It’s definitely the main focus of comments these days. But perhaps because of this, Yacktrack is great for ensuring we don’t only focus on Friendfeed. It lets you discover and acknowledge the discussion that happens in less common or popular arenas.

Filed under: Blogging, Comment, Review by Robin Cannon

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