Blogging about blogging is still interesting to many, confirming my point that we are still early, early, early in the adoption curve. Yes, the web accelerates the diffusion of innovation (years instead of decades), but we’re not there yet. Remember: very few people move at the speed of technology.
Because I don’t have comments enabled, and my TrackBack is erratic (something up with radiocomments.userland.com, it seems), I have to work a little harder to learn about what people are saying about my blog. Honestly, I rarely worry about it, because there aren’t that many readers and few of them (I think?) are bloggers themselves. So, when Mike showed me that Jeremy Zawodny picked up my thoughts and took them a bit further, I decided to learn more about what others might be writing. Note: I saw the references in my reader later that night, but Mike gets the thanks for pointing out the links first.
I think Zawodny’s practice of building in per-post links to external “link tracking” services (Technorati, Bloglines citations, and Feedster) is useful, but it also highlights how far we have to go. Or maybe I’m just a perfectionist, and I should be amazed that it works at all?! Certainly, it takes more than one service to get a clear picture. I tried the same three services as Zawodny and found that:
- Technorati found only one link, from Jeremy (same as my faulty TrackBack).
- Bloglines finds seven links, but only four unique posts.
- Feedster finds four links, but only three unique.
Overall, spread further than I would have thought, mostly thanks to Jeremy’s audience and Matt’s quick mention. Here are places I found links in no particular order using the tools above:
- Scoble linkblog
- Adam Rifkin, of FoRK (among other labels), notes Jeremy’s post in passing. You’d have to be looking for it. For a year or so, I was on the FoRK mailing list. Too much for me, but that group clearly makes bloggers look like slowpokes in the adoption curve.
- Steven O’Grady threw a link in to Jeremy, on Del.icio.us: “Zawodny on blogs as personal brands – syncs with Weinberger’s notion of blogging persistence”
- Ross Mayfield did the same: “Jeremy touches upon a key issue. My readers ask for categorization, and I won’t give it to them. You either follow me, or not.”
- Jonas cut to the chase.
- Adam Kalsey applies the weighted list to his own blog for classification after seeing Jeremy’s riff on my note.
Yes, I’m navel-gazing, but it’s fun to watch where the ripples spread… or don’t. I have more to say on the idea of classification, but I’ll put that in another topical (ahem) post.