apcampbell

In his attempt to increase the activity in his personal learning network, John expresses difficulty interacting with ‘other weblogs’:

One of the most difficult aspects of interacting on other weblogs is that I have to remember to revisit sites to see if there has been any further discussion of the topic I originally responded to.  Read more…

John shouldn’t be spending so much time surfing around on other sites, continuously checking archived postings for responses to his comments - it’s too time consuming.  So the question of whether to comment on another person’s site or whether to post to one’s own blog while ‘pinging’ the person’s site with whom you wish to interact (trackback) is an important question to consider for those of us using weblogs to learn and communicate. 

Stewart Henshall provides some helpful thoughts on this issue in a November 2003 post on his weblog, Unbound Spiral.  He suggests that comments may be used for the purposes of introducing oneself, for throwing down a quick comment (speed), or for making a posting non-related to the theme of one’s own weblog.   Trackback, however, can serve to broaden the conversation by highlighting it and making it available to others, especially now that RSS feeds, aggregators, and conversational search engines like Technorati’s cosmos are being used with more frequency.  I think Stewart’s outlook is right on target.

Think of a comment as a gift.  When you leave a comment on another person’s site, you don’t expect anything in return, nor do you expect a conversation to arise.  There is no need to re-visit the site to see if the person has responded, just as you would not check up on people to see if they were indeed using the presents you gave them over the holiday season.

Think of a blog posting also as a gift, but one to the community rather than a specific individual.  That community also includes you!  We trackback when we wish to expand and reflect upon other people’s conversations (both inner and outer), not only as part of meeting our own learning needs, but also to expose our reflections for the benefit of others.  They can choose to listen (RSS subscriptions) or tune us out according to their needs.  Thus, it is the blog posting that should be given a greater significance when it comes to learning through conversation and reflection.

In John’s case, if the conversation resulting from the comment he left on another weblog was important for his own learning, he should have posted it on his own site; the other person would have been notified via trackback.   Likewise, if the other blogger deemed his comment worthy of further discussion, he or she would have brought it to the attention of others by making a weblog post, which is sure to show up in other people’s aggregators or search engine results.  Comments rarely do.  

If Downes is right, this conversation may soon come to an end, for it looks like social networking will become much easier in the near future as software advances reflect our needs. 

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