I agree with you @ posts that “reflect some more serious level of engagement with the topic”

However, this has also got something to do with the audience. And therefore, I believe a blog needs to have a target audience in mind. That is the crux! A personal blog, like mine, for example, caters to a very generic audience. When writing for a specific audience, I guess, you think twice when posting (not always, but often). Whether you like it or not; whether you realise it or not — you end up slow blogging!

You are most welcome, and lest I ever forget to mention it — your blog is a delight!

This needs some work! :)

One problem I see is the issue of trackbacks and using that as the mechanism for notifying when another post comes up. I know that for myself I’m often terrible about pinging other sites. And I also know that often I don’t get trackbacks submitted when someone references my site–I find them through my Technorati feed or Google Alerts. So there would have to be some other mechanism for notifying when subsequent posts have been made. I don’t think we can rely on the pings.

The other thought I have is that these conversations take place not just on blogs, but in other places as well. The original discussion about facilitating conversations between bloggers actually began in our Ning community and then I posted it on my blog. There was some good stuff said in that Ning conversation that doesn’t necessarily get added to the larger discussion. I think that as more and more of us are using multiple online channels for discussion (including networks, forums, Twitter, etc.) it would make sense if we could find a way to tie ALL of that together into a coherent whole.

It may go back to what Beth Kanter is saying–that this is where human “weavers” come into play. We’re the ones who have to monitor and synthesize. Although I’d still love to find a way for technology to make my monitoring easier. :-)

As regards Google search, I guess a specific tagging schema may help - but then again - we are depending on human consistency!

==Michele:
You are right about the topic of the blog. Politics and such, I agree takes the lead in longer (and heated) conversations. However, am sure there are other areas of interest where there are multiple comments (maybe not to the order of 200+, yet…). In any case, I guess, I believe we are referring to conversations that aren’t banter. Your comment helps extrapolate my idea further, where, we could, perhaps choose the “users” whose responses we want to see across blogs across a topic (or topics). Somehow, at this time, given your and Christy’s comment, I wish I had retained some of my programming skills from college.

I insist that the script isn’t too complicated! :)

==Sue:
Co.mment is (now) working just fine for me - just signed up. My biggest problem was that, while I was able to track my comments on WordPress blogs, my comments on BlogSpot and TypePad and such weren’t too easy to track. More so if I left a comment on a blog that wasn’t on my blogroll. Co.mment is now taking care of that problem - that fact that I can subscribe to it - is even better!

It is very interesting that you bring up twitter (I am following you now, btw, “twitter: atulsabnis”). I have been trying hard since having read Scott Carp and his musings on Face-book, blogging and Twitter. It does seem-like an interesting tool - am yet to find a way to harness its power…er…sort of! :)

Thank you all for a wonderful conversation - even if the technology doesn’t exist for us to manage it - what is more important is that we have the conversation! :)

A classic example of a cross conversation was between Graham Wegner (Adelaide), myself, Clay Burell (Korea) and Patrick Higgins (USA) which started as a result of our different opinions on use of Ning for professional development. How it could all happen and run effectively was because I was using co-mment and he was obviously using a similar application. Often we would both be writing our responses on all the different blogs, or email each other, at the same time — we were being that efficient in our responses.

I also know a lot of the original 31 Day Participants have not realised the potential of twitter but twitter is where we are also having many of these conversations and debating what we are reading. Twitter is also bringing good readers to my blog. If you are not using Twitter you need to realise that it is becoming increasingly important to many people’s personal learning.