THE DREAM IN ACTION

Recently the concept of the online conversation has been very prevalent in my offline conversations. As I find new blogs or even news sites that I like the importance of the community around that site becomes relevant and is an asset (or liability) to the site. Whether I’m reading a local story at OnMilwaukee or reading AVC.com or following readers here on Ryan A Graves.com it is important to me what others think about the story or post I’m reading.

As that conversation held by the community becomes more important it becomes more important to me that it is easily manageable and followable. I don’t want to have to take that conversation off the site to Twitter or email, but I want it right there. I think I’m coining the term  “conversation centralization” as the ability to keep the communities interactions in one place. The best place for the centralization is where the conversation started, on the blog.

As I bounce around the web and contribute or listen to different conversations (as I do very often) I’ve found one tool that has dominated and really been the embodiment of conversation centralization, DISQUS commenting system. DISQUS (pronounced, “discuss”) gives me the ability to comment, then receive any follow up comments or responses in my email, then re-respond directly from my email, but the conversation centralization piece is that it posts my comment back to that blog for others to follow. DISQUS completely eliminates (in my experience) spam comments and adds huge value to a site! Guy Kawasaki recently posted about another commenting system he uses on his blog but I ‘commented’ back to him to check out DISQUS for these added features. For a blogger with a ton of readers who wants to manage a large amount of conversation from their blog, this is hands down the most efficient tool. This commenting system also allows you to track all of your comments, and replys on their site.

Whether you check out DISQUS or not is really not my concern. The point is that conversation centralization is going to be key for sites to find and expose the true hidden value in their readers and communities. It use to be all about the blogger, now it’s all about the community around the blog.