I wrote a brief note about some blog comment tracking systems a while ago: these are sites that let you monitor the conversation in the comments section of a blog post. I just mentioned a few, but Chris Brogan gives the topic a deserved more in depth look this week:
My thought is that RSS as a communications medium, while being wholly responsible for all the good and wonderful and magical things that have come to the web over the last 5 or 6 years, might need an upgrade. Why? Because I want the comment flow. I want to be part of the back and forth of the conversation under the hood.
Yes, I understand that some blogging platforms have a separate RSS feed for comments, but is that the right solution to the problem? I don’t think so. I think it has to be something more robust, and maybe with a toggle.
The most important first steps for getting involved in social media is joining the conversation; while it’s great that you can do blog searches and save them as RSS feed and keep up with what people are saying about your topics of interest and your organization, it’s not enough.
The conversation might start with a blog post, but it continues in the comments. And on Twitter. And all over the place. The tools for keeping track of blogs (RSS and Atom and the various readers) are very nice. The tools for the rest of it are a lot less refined.
Here’s what I would love to see: an integrated way of following all of this. I don’t mean any of the various social media monitoring systems that have been designed for organizations; those can be great. I mean essentially NewsGator or Google Reader for the whole online universe, designed for the individual. Oh, yeah, and can it be free please?
Or is it out there? What are the best pieces of the solution floating around? Let’s have a conversation about that…