Weekly Recap 053008: ‘No Comment’

The week that was…

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Good discussion this week about comments…first, there was the latest installment of this issue: comment dispersion away from the originating blog…Fred Wilson at A VC weighed in: Jackson instigated the conversation with that post. His reward is the comments it generates…interestingly, bloggers with big established audiences agreed with him…Chris Brogan wrote this on Fred’s blog: One part of the currency I crave from doing a blog is that conversation, especially on my blog, where I spend lots of effort building the posts to be conversation starters, not just fully formed ideas…Mathew Ingram wrote a concurring blog post Bloggers get “paid” with comments…

Which made me wonder, do you think there’s a divide between larger established bloggers and smaller, newer bloggers on this issue of distributed conversations?

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Next up on the comment discussions…who actually owns the comments?…there was a controversy early in the week where Rob La Gesse was irritated at the comments that were occurring on FriendFeed about his blog post…so he pulled his blog RSS from FriendFeed, which eradicated that post and all its comments from the FriendFeed UI…this raised the question of who owns the comments, and whether FriendFeed should do a better job of keeping records…Mathew Ingram reached out to FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, who noted the bias is toward blogger control of their feeds and that they will look at ways to solve to better retain comments…

Later, Daniel Ha of Disqus wrote a post called A Commenter’s Rights…kind of a Bill of Rights for those who leave comments on blogs…one Right that I liked: ‘The ability to edit and remove their comments’…too many blogs don’t allow that, including wordpress.com…

We’ll close this out with a quote from my favorite cranky blogger Steven Hodson: This whole discussion about comments is becoming borderline stupid…

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FriendFeed is growing, and not surprisingly, it’s getting its share of…um…interesting personalities…click this link which takes you to a search for “tweets totally f%(#ed twitter”…you’ll understand what I mean…

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Hats off to a couple of developers this week…I wrote a post titled FriendFeed ‘Likes’ Compatibility Index…I manually pulled together some stats to see which other FriendFeeders had the same Likes as me…well Yuvi wrote a script that he could run from his computer for any FriendFeed handle he entered…a bunch of us wanted our stats manually calculated, and he obliged…he blogged about it, and hit Techmeme…very nice Yuvi…

Then another developer, felix, created a UI where anyone could enter their FriendFeed handle to see the people who shared Likes the most…and then felix thought, “I’m going to turn this one up to 11″…he made pie charts out of the results, which have become a big hit on FriendFeed…FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor gave his thumbs up on felix’s blog, “Very cool!“…very nice work felix…

BTW, we’re all one playing for second place to Shey in the Likes department…

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Jeremiah Owyang apparently has an interesting post on FriendFeed that he’s writing for Saturday 5/31/08…Robert Scoble talked with Jeremiah, and gave this update:

I just talked with Jeremiah. He says FriendFeed will turn on a new functionality that Jeremiah is calling “MiniMeme.” He wouldn’t give me more details, but I am intrigued.

So check your RSS reader for Jeremiah’s post, and maybe we’ll be talking about that here next week….

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See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%22Weekly+Recap+053008%3A+%E2%80%98No+Comment%E2%80%99%22&public=1