I wish I could remember who originally linked me to Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent website. I’d like to thank them. This was the site that finally got me off my digital duff to set up a feed reader. How long has RSS been around now? Didn’t Barney subscribe to Fred’s RSS feed back in the day? Anyway, this morning I saw a new item from Conversation Agent which was a clever play on a classic internet meme. The title read “You’ve Got Comments.“
Comments are something I love to see on my sites. It reassures me that the time I spend sharing my thoughts with the world is not entirely for naught. I read the post, went to comment, then had to tell myself I’d be back later. I must have gone back and read the post two or three times, all out of order too, before I felt I had organized my thoughts enough to leave a comment that wasn’t fail.
Personally, I hope to develop a community around my site, but not so much based on my site. For that reason, Valeria’s comments on scalability and facilitating conversations strike a chord. As authors, I think we all like the reassurance that comes with reader comments. If all we did was write to see metrics increase on graphs in the cloud, we wouldn’t need comments, but while the internet has allowed humans to connect to one another globally, it seems we’re still trying to figure out just what that means. The safety of relative anonymity on the internet is being traded for the potential of meaningful connections with other, real people. This is no small step.
The subject of comments can involve the most self-centered of motives, but I feel that it’s actually on the cutting edge of social media and all those other buzzword-riddled subjects. Everyone is enamored with the concept of making connections and sharing with each other, but while Twitter lets me share my thoughts 140 characters at a time and my blog(s) let me share my thoughts 14,000 characters at a time, comments are where the real conversations happen. I think that’s something I want to work on.
So, Conversation Agent was my first RSS subscription. Today it marks my first attempt at a trackback. Kinda cool. Sorry I ended up not leaving a comment after all, Valeria. (I’ll keep coming back though, promise!)
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