Fractured Commenting (I’m late to this, but I’m early, too)

I was going to stay out of this one because I feel like I’ve already voiced my opinion on it, but then found I just couldn’t resist: the weekend’s bitchmeme was fractured commenting in the blogosphere. On Deep Jive Interests Tony started the conversation by getting riled up over Shyftr after Matthew wondered if it crossed a line, Louis Gray pushed the meme forward, and then Scoble said bloggers have lost control. Numerous others had their say too.

Louis linked to my article on Read Write Web: "Why Blog Commets Still Matter" in his post, but I really think it was this article where I began my initial freak-out: "The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere."

On that post, I listed all the places where the conversation had moved to, including, of course, FriendFeed (this was pre-Wordpress plugin days). But most importantly, I detailed how you could keep up with all the conversations no matter where they were (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, FF, MySpace, etc.). Good point of reference if you’re looking for tools.

I also again rehashed things here: "More on the Blogosphere’s Diluted Conversation."

Since this was all a few weeks ago, I didn’t think I had anything new to add to the discussion, which is why I was going to let this one just pass me by.

But then, I saw this comment on Scoble’s blog, where Louis takes another viewpoint, asking:

"should I personally be annoyed that the discussion on this topic (which I, in theory, kicked off) is taking place on Scoble’s blog? "

Obviously, the smiley shows he’s kidding, but I realized then that we, as bloggers, myself included, sometimes have a sense of ownership or entitlement to the conversations we start. Should I be annoyed that I started this conversation weeks ago, with not one but three blog posts, but it’s Scoble who gets the credit?, I asked myself.

Ultimately, the answer is no. Thoughts, opinions, and conversations don’t belong to anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Just like I can’t stand the blog comments that go "I wrote about this on my blog last week," and then add nothing more, one can never claim to have started any conversation. Not really. Although I appreciate the link Louis gave me in his post, it wasn’t really necessary to give any sort of "credit," it’s only necessary to give "context."

That’s all links should be – context…not credit, not ownership.

We’re all getting too caught up in our links, our pageviews, our stats, and our traffic. We’re supposed to be bloggers, not businesses. If we write quality posts, all that stuff…it will come.

So, I know you were half-kidding in your comment there, Louis, but you made me think, so I answered you anyway.