Should we reunite fragmented conversations?

I've been thinking a lot about the fragmentation of content and its consumption. I'm interested in the effect fragmentation is having on online discussions. As a producer of content on a small scale, discussion matters. Each comment matters. Post-generated-discussion is a positive feedback system for obtaining critical feedback, promoting work product through user engagement, and ultimately driving future content production. The problem is that such discussion is fragmented.

Fragmented discussion is a problem for the big guys and the little guys like myself. The big guys obtain discussion at the point of production (blog) given the size of their audience, although the majority of their consumption and therefore conversations occur off site through RSS readers and social news sites. This problem was pronounced earlier in the year as "the conversation has left the blogsphere".

For the little guy (the average content producer) the audience is tiny, relying upon the promoting and uptake of posted content on social news and remote consumption tools. Relying upon the conversations around content off site.

I suspect the consumer, (the end user of the produced content) could not care less about this perceived problem. Communities form, and users particulate in conversations around content with other like-minded users. I know I do. I care more about the opinions and discussion of fellow users on hacker news than I do the conversations that occur on the linked posts that are discussed, or the discussions within parallel communities such as reddit.

From the consumer perspective, fragmentation of online discussions is part of the natural evolution of the space, like traditional broadcast media. So where does that leave the producers who either for economic reasons (ad views) or for first-order feedback reasons rely on the conversations occurring on site?

Conversations are markets, and are therefore valuable both directly (what is said), and generally (eyeballs). Conversations may not belong on blogs, although there is a heated battleground of products for managing these on site comments, such as Disqus and Sezwho. Social news empires like Digg are built upon this premise, providing a platform for discussion around other peoples content. Lifestreaming applications like FriendFeed fulfil the "need" of push-communicating work product and activity within social cliques, in aggregate represent the new point of reaction.

Fragmentation is a liberator of content and a democratize of content producers. Consumers are happy with the fragmentation, providing better and more focused content and comment along a variety of axes. Given that comments are useful, even valuable, the content producer has two clear problems, eyeballs and keeping up with the discussion.

I equate the eyeball problem with the problem faced by musicians and the fragmented consumption of their music, specifically the consumption channels where they are not getting a slice of the action (however indirect). The solution (it seems); be happy that your content is being consumed, produce more good content, and actively promote methods of consumption where you can get a bigger slice (tour).

The second problem is interesting in that I believe it only belongs to producers although it apparently is assumed to belong to consumers as well. For example, comment re-integration from multiple sources aimed at the consumer is a loosing strategy as it only serves the producer. The only strategy left to the producer is to manually spider and track the fragmented discussions.

I have experienced this producer-centric pain personally from my small-guy perspective. As such, over the last week Matt and I have developed a prototype solution that re-integrates comments from multiple sources, aimed at content producers called comment is king, playing on the classical Internet mantra content is king. It is raw, slow (albeit pretty), and provides a first pass at a solution to this problem that is as pervasive as web content producers.

What is clear to me is that raw analytics are interesting although bland. Raw re-integration of the broader discussion is also likely a poor approach, (at least for the big-guys) given the amount of trolls and spams on an average digg or slashdot (re)post. I think the core value add are the controls on top of the aggregate itself. Filtering, searching, and generally navigating and participating in the integrated broader discussion. Beyond that I think there is value in parsing the aggregate for related links, sentiment, even popular snippets or memes mentioned in the original post.

Does this re-integrated belong on the post? I think no. Would it drive traffic back to the originating source? Again, I think no, although I think it could offer something to consumers participating in the discussion.

Two related (although different) products make me think this, AideRSS that uses a set of broader conversation indicators to rank content, the best of which can be presented to users, and backtype aimed at "commenting content consumers" that indexes comments offering aggregation along the comment and user axes.

The results produced by comment is king are already interesting, we will see how this webapp evolves.