Feedster's Scott Rafer wrote to point out that there is a URL syntax for assembling the conversation around a blog post:
http://www.feedster.com/links.php?url=\ http%3A%2F%2Fweblog.infoworld.com%2Fudell%2F2004%2F07%2F16.html%23a1041
You need to escape the target URL, which isn't easy to do while copying and pasting it, but is easy for a bookmarklet to do. So, drag this link -- Feedster Citations -- to your toolbar, and you can have one-click access to the conversations around any blog post you're currently viewing.
The Bloglines equivalent, by the way, is:
http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=\ http%3A%2F%2Fweblog.infoworld.com%2Fudell%2F2004%2F07%2F16.html%23a1041
and here is the Bloglines Citations bookmarklet. Again, drag it to your toolbar for one-click access to Bloglines citation lookups.
Currently, this pair of queries (Feedster, Bloglines) yields the same set of items referring to Friday's Feedster reloaded item. This suggests to me that conversation tracking is becoming more deterministic. Excellent!
Is it really necessary, by the way, to escape the target URLs? If not, the use of these query mechanisms would be able to spread more virally.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/07/17.html#a1042