SheGeeks

What was once a Mashable exclusive feature may now be available to every blog using the Disqus commenting system. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Social Media Reactions! (See Mashable’s post for an in-depth review: Mashable, Disqus, and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments.) Hat tip to Wayne Sutton for the tip off!

Social Media Reactions By Disqus

In short, social media reactions (formerly Social Media Comments) pulls mentions and comments about your content made on other web services into your Disqus commenting system. For example, if someone posts a comment about your latest post on FriendFeed, Disqus finds it and pulls it into the system as a “social media reaction.”

Head to your Disqus account under Admin & Settings. Scroll down and you’ll find an option to enable Social Media Reactions. Current services include FriendFeed, Vimeo, Twitter, Picasca, Digg, Flickr, Blogg, Typepad, Wordpress, Movable Type, Youtube, and an option for other services.

Comment Fragmentation Who?

I’m not sure if this will pull in comments and mentions made on previous posts. I highly doubt it in any case. I’m not sure how well this works right now, but I plan to test it out on SheGeeks for the rest of the week. So feel free to comment on Friendfeed or Twitter about the content on SheGeeks.net.

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Everyday we crank out posts for readers to respond. We try to contribute to the conversation. We aim to solve a problem or have a problem solved for us by our readers. Everyday. The overall point is to receive feedback among other things. Can we all agree with that?Yet, there’s a huge stir about conversation fragmentation. I’m not going to rehash it. My focus for this post is whether users are now commenting for the authors or for the audience.

A Shift From Author To Audience

A huge shift seems to be occurring to the latter: the audience. Louis Gray’s latest post shows that it might not be as bad as we think. However, we’re not all Louis Gray (no offense Louis). For those that aren’t very well known, the shift from the comments being directed towards the author to the audience is a tough blow. Smaller blogs won’t welcome the hassle. Those with a more established reader base won’t really have to worry. Yet, one should ask their readers, are you commenting for me or are you commenting for the audience?

Commenting To The Author

If you’re commenting for the author, I feel there’s no reason that you should be commenting on places such as FriendFeed, Digg, Mixx, or any other site that isn’t the original site. Yesterday Steven Hodson pointed out:

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.

My question to Steven is: were your comments for the author or for an audience? If it was for the author then you clearly shouldn’t have went back to FriendFeed. What sense would it make? Why make it more challenging for the author to know what’s on your mind if you’re directing comments at them, but posting them in an alternate site?

The Audience Isn’t Conversation Fragmentation

If you’re commenting for the an audience, then that’s an entirely different story and really is not for the author to worry about. In this case, it’s not even conversation fragmentation. It’s simply the user going off elsewhere to get opinions on a topic. While it would be nice to have that brainstorm session on the original site, it’s not necessary and doesn’t affect the author one way or another. The conversation would eventually venture off from the main point of the conversation anyways. Why would you, as an author, want users to start getting off topic on your site? You can definitely take that elsewhere for me.

Think and Clarify

Clarity is important here. Authors have to get over what’s not entirely meant for them and those that comment need to figure out who the hell they want to talk to. Users aren’t being clear on what their goal is, which is only stirring the pot even more.

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As of lately, members of the social aggregator Friendfeed are really starting to piss people off (including me). Here’s a look at why.
      

Attitude Problem

The elitist attitude problem is definitely starting to take over on Friendfeed. Users are being down right rude to bloggers who have various issues with Friendfeed. For example, David Risely recently posted "The FriendFeed Orgasm And Why It Is Off The Mark". It’s a pretty controversial post, but only in the mind of Friendfeed users. Risely points out some echoed problems of Friendfeed, including it’s contributions to the "Conversation Fragmentation" arena.

Friendfeed users are complaining that Risely shouldn’t worry about where the comments about his content are going. Well, those same users should’ve left the numerous bloggers who complained about Shyftr doing the same (among other things), the same comments!
      

No Respect

On top of that, users are hiding behind the walls of Friendfeed riddled with snarky and borderline derisive words for Risely’s opinions.

The FriendFeed community (not as a whole) shows very little respect for those that disagree with the service. They’re doing the same thing that Mac fanboys are prone to doing: being ignorant. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen on Friendfeed.
   

Not Everyone Is A Friendfeed Junkie

David Risely’s post pointed out valid problems of Friendfeed: really high noise levels and sucks for bloggers. Not everyone could care less about where the comments about their content is headed. While no one owns a conversation, you could still respect an authors opinions on what they’d like.

And who hasn’t said it; Friendfeed’s noise level is really high! Sure you can hide everything for an entire service or for various people, but that’s a tedious process in itself and doesn’t solve everything.

It’s a bit hard to wrap my head around some of the comments because some of these people are bloggers that I respect and who have always been polite and helpful when disagreeing with the opinions of not only myself but others.

This continued shallowness and "eye rolling" attitude will piss people off like crazy. As I stated on Friendfeed to Alex von Halem and Robert Scoble, not everyone is a Friendfeed junkie.

What’s so hard about respecting that?

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