AMY GAHRAN: The Right Conversation

Folding this blog back into Contentious.com

For a couple of years now I've had this blog, The Right Conversation, devoted to the emerging and fast-moving field of conversational media. It was a spin-off from my main blog, Contentious.

However, it's proven to me more work than I can handle to keep up both blogs. So I've decided to fold this blog back into Contentious.

I'll be leaving this site up for the time being, as I migrate the content here over to Contentious so it's all in one place (and findable by a single site search engine). But eventually I will redirect this domain to the conversational media category on Contentious.

Thanks for reading The Right Conversation. If you want to continue reading about conversational media as well as other news and musing from Amy Gahran about how we communicate in the online age, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed or e-mail alerts at Contentious.

Link blog pros & cons

My friend, colleague, and fellow blogger Dave Taylor wrote on March 7 about how he's finally "succumbed" and created a link blog: Dave Taylor's blog clippings

...A link blog is a way to use a weblog to share interesting links. There are lots of different ways to do it. For this weblog, I save links (with relevant excerpts or comments) in del.icio.us and then use an automated system to compile and post a daily roundup of links. (For instance, here's yesterday's link posting.)

Dave points out that while having a linkblog fulfills some needs (for him and, presumably, his audience), it's not exactly conversational -- especially in his case, since the tool he's chosen does not allow comments.

I shared my thoughts on linkblogs with Dave, and asked him to explain his linkblog rationale further....

BWB (Blogging While Busy)

There's no getting around it: Following and participating in conversational media, especially blogging, takes time. For many folks, that's a huge hurdle. Occasionally my own time crunch lands me in a blogging bind.

I've been fortunate lately to score several meaty consulting projects. However, they're all due in approximately the same time frame, so I'm scrambling to get them done. Hence, I haven't been blogging much lately on any of my blogs.

However, I have been reading and commenting on a few other blogs. For me, that tends to take much less time then crafting a typical post for one of my own blogs. (I really don't like dashing off half-formed thoughts, that doesn't suit me.)

It strikes me that I can leverage my comments on other blogs constructively to both create postings when I'm really busy, and to expand the excellent conversations I've already joined. Here's what I have in mind...

How Do You Start Telling an Engaging Tale?

This morning I spent some time working on the layout of this site. Hopefully it's an improvement. If you look at the top of the right-hand sidebar, you'll see I've added a short definition of "conversational media," since most people aren't familiar with the term.

This definition is the current result of discussions surrounding my earlier post, "The Elevator Speech for Conversational Media." Thanks to everyone who contributed to that discussion -- especially Heidi Miller, who has done some excellent coverage of the art of the elevator speech (which she calls the "two-second statement") in her podcast "Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter." (Full disclosure: Heidi's a former coaching client of mine.)

I read through the links that Heidi offered in the show notes for her Sept. 22, 2005 podcast. That chain of ideas got me pondering how an "elevator speech/two-second statement" differs from a "definition" -- and how both types of content can help shape any conversation.

I started thinking: I'm missing the point. What I really need is a short definition for conversational media and a two-second statement for myself. Furthermore, each of these key bits of "microcontent" needs to be the beginning of an interactive story, not merely a flat statement...

I Now Have a Working Comment Feed

Well, after hunting around for options, I finally found a way to successfully generate a feed of the comments to this blog in a way that is apparently valid and accessible to any feed reader.

CHECK IT OUT!

Why does this matter? Well, a comment feed is a crucial conversational-media tool, since it makes the content of your weblog comments as easily findable as your blog posts. This is because you can submit your comment feed to popular feed aggregation services like Technorati or IceRocket. When you do that, your blog comments will appear in their search results.

It's just one more way to clue people in to the entirety of conversations that happen on your blog. The easier it is to discover those conversations, the more likely it becomes that more people will join in.

Here's what I did....