Source: FTC Inside

Comment fragmentation is the term used to describe the process by which people comment on a blog post in multiple places where there is an associated link that you can use to reference the original post. Some people think that comment fragmentation penalizes the content creator.

This is particularly true on the FriendFeed website, where each blog post can be linked and relinked via social news and social bookmarking functions, which appear in FriendFeed whenever the author chooses to share their RSS feed from an application. The phenomenon multiplies, however, when the blog readers are also active in these social media services, which help spawn many instances or branches of the conversation.

You could compare this situation to an artist who puts a lot of work into a painting, but who doesn’t get to hear or see all of the reviews about his or her work. They may be frantic to get feedback about their work, but that feedback may be spread across dozens of conversations, including little groups of people that huddle together to talk about the artist’s painting..

At WinExtra, Steven Hodson argued that comment fragmentation isn’t the blogger’s fault, but he also made an interesting observation about fragmentation:

First we have when someone reads a post on some blog and posts a link to FriendFeed or Twitter. Or second we have the post link showing up on FriendFeed or Twitter when the blogger hits the publish button. In either case for us to read that actual post we have to click through to the blog and read it.

What happens next is the screwed up part.

We all go back to FriendFeed, Shyftr or even Twitter and we talk about the post there. I know because I have caught myself doing this numerous times but it wasn’t until this morning when I click through on FriendFeed to read Fred Wilson’s post only to return to FriendFeed to make my comment. I could just as easily have made the comment on Fred’s blog and really that is what I should have done but instead I added to some perceived fragmentation of the comments around that post.

The interesting point about Steven’s observation is that it seems to take more effort to jump in and out of FriendFeed to make a comment about a blog post.

Or does it?

Could it be that commenting on FriendFeed takes less effort than within the blog?

Consider the following advantages to commenting in FriendFeed over commenting directly on the blog:

  • You can do the FriendFeed Like and Comment functions on the same screen. Many people like to do both when they want to drop a comment - this lets you do it on one screen.
  • You don’t have to fill in Name, Website, and E-Mail address to drop a comment in FriendFeed; you just have to sign in and many people stay signed in.
  • You don’t have to worry about your comment getting lost in moderation or Akismet spam filtering - the FriendFeed thread owner would have to delete or hide the thread somehow to suppress the comment (don’t even know if this is possible, actually).
  • No Captcha functionality in FriendFeed to slow you down.
  • No need for a separate user ID to leave a comment.
  • Some bloggers are more responsive to FriendFeed comments than comments at their own blog, which means that in some situations the blogger actually perpetuates the problem. I’m sure that we can all think of an example or two where this happens.

I like Steven’s approach of trying harder to comment directly at the blog because it puts the comment within the blogger’s house, so to speak. However, if you think about the disincentives that I’ve noted above, is it really that surprising that the conversations are dispersing?

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