A recent blog post of Oliver Reichen­stein “Kill Blog Com­ments?” stirred up some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions on twitter.

The most inter­est­ing issue would be how to track those com­ments on twit­ter, Olivier’s ini­tial tweet “New blog post: Kill Blog Com­ments? http://​tiny​url​.com/​d​h​p​g8k” had as a mat­ter of iden­ti­fic­a­tion only the tinyurl.

Track­ing replies and com­ments would require that each com­ment would either be an reply to @iA in a spe­cific time­frame (imprac­tical as you may have replies to other @iA tweets) either should men­tion that tiny­url, so
you can search it.

A hashtag would be bet­ter suited for this pur­pose, Oliver tried to use #3 (quite ambigu­ous and twit­ter search doesn’t yield any res­ults). I tried to use the longer hashtag derived from the blog post URL #kill-​the-​blog-​comments and again the twit­ter search doesn’t like it, too long? dashes?

How to cre­ate an unam­bigu­ous hashtag? I took the tiny­url for the post http://​tiny​url​.com/​d​h​p​g8k and used the path as a hashtag #dhpg8k, it works but tiny­url is one of the hun­dreds of URL short­ners; it would be the author respons­ib­il­ity to issue an unam­bigu­ous hashtag for a track­able conversation.

Ideally twit­ter search should be able to search in ‘expan­ded tiny­urls’ (regard­less of the short­ner imple­ment­a­tion, just derefer­ence…) such that a search for http://​inform​a​tion​ar​chi​tects​.jp/​k​i​l​l​-​t​h​e​-​b​l​o​g​-​c​o​m​m​e​n​ts/ would yield res­ults con­tain­ing http://​tiny​url​.com/​d​h​p​g8k, http://​bit​.ly/​Y​N​7pw, etc.

Moreover to ease aggreg­a­tion on the blog post that is com­men­ted, Twit­ter should try to use track­back whenever some­body posts a link to a track­back enabled resource.

Please com­ment on Twit­ter, using hashtag #d3se8y derived from the tiny­url for this post http://​tiny​url​.com/​d​3​s​e8y.

See the com­ments by search­ing #d3se8y.