In yet another excellent post, Bernard Yu (@thebestsophist) questions how do we as content publishers — I’m hesitant to describe myself as an “author” even though technically the definition fits since I’m writing right now — design our content in such a way that encourages quality discussion, despite the knee-jerk, immediate-response tendencies inherent in online communication:

Nowadays on blogs, newspaper websites, and everywhere else we often have a chance to voice our opinions immediately after we consume something. We can say the first thing that comes to our mind, regardless of whether what we say is complete or coherent. We have sacrificed thoughtfulness for timeliness. Furthermore, because of the anonymity of the web we can often say it with no consequence to ourselves. This combination has given us Prometheus’s courage and conviction, but none of his foresight.

– Sneak-Attack Philosophy, How Do We Design for the Great Conversation?

This starts to come back to some of my original comments on the matter – the idea of the fractured conversation is what I was trying to get at but couldn’t quite articulate at the time.

Enabling inline comments certainly makes it easier to comment on a given subject or post, but generally at the cost of quality. Disabling comments and requiring blog-to-blog discussion (or, in Bernard’s example case of Bobulate, emails to the author) probably raises the likelihood of quality feedback, but makes it exponentially harder to follow the thread of the conversation from point to point.

At this point in the Internet’s development, there’s no good solid way of tracking that sort of conversation. Sure there are things like trackbacks, but they’re generally not well understood by most people if at all supported. Some services like Technorati do some of the cross-linking tracking, but only if you’re one of the giant sites.

The huge web of related conversations gets almost impossible to follow, especially if you’re unaware of the other sites that are partaking in the discussion. Joe Schmoe may have written the most insightful response to this piece ever composed by a human mind, but I have no idea who he is or what his site is, so I may never get to read it. And unless he comes here and leaves a link (which generally appears to be spam on most comment threads), we’re all out of luck.

So what’s the solution to tying the threads together and enabling the Great Conversation?