The recent flip of the calendar (well not so recent, jeez, it’s been two weeks) reminds me that February is the time for my annual blog hiatus– I take some time off from posting here and devote my attention to commenting on other people’s blogs. This makes for the fifth annual CogDogBlogMuzzle, having done so in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Usually this coincides with attending the Northern Voice conference but since apparently there is some other small event happening in Vancouver, NV10 has been nudged to May 2010.

I do this because I still believe, after all these years, that blogging is not just about your own blabbing, but equally the critical act of participating in the spaces of other blogs. That is, if I can find any, as we all now allegedly blogs are dead. Again. That twitter, facebook, buzz et al have killed blogging.

Bullshit.

The only thing killing blogging, if indeed it is being killed, is people losing track of the value of having a publishing space of their own.

Again as before, I hope to find this invigorating and also to sample some blogs I’ve not read much. And also in tradition, I have run my yearly set of stats to find my top bloggers; this is a MySQL query I run in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE comment_date >= ‘2009-01-01′
AND comment_date < ‘2010-01-01′
GROUP BY comment_author
ORDER BY acnt DESC

And here’s my applause for my leading commenters (well I wont applaud myself, that is not cool). I love you dearly.

• Alan Levine 149
• Jim Groom 37
• D’Arcy Norman 31
• Gardner 24
• Cole 18
• Stephen Downes 17
• Harriet 13
• Patrick Murray-John 13
• TOM 12
• Darren Kuropatwa 11
• Robin Heyden 11
• Russ Goerend 11
• Chris L 8
• Gerry 7
• Devon 6
• Susan WB 6
• Scott Leslie 6
• Beth Kanter 6
• alexanderhayes 6
• Kristina Hoeppner 6
• Liz Dorland 5
• Ed Webb 5
• David 5
• Rob Wall 5
• Mathieu Plourde 5
• michael chalk 5
• Allanah K 5
• Laura 5
• Suzanne Aurilio 5

But alas, the stats do show a drop in activity, both in my posting and comment activity, here in a chart generated in my Google doc of stats:

Maybe blogging is dying? My number of posts this year fell to almost what they were my first year. Am I my own hypocrite? Is it true the Nobody blogs like the Bava? NOBODY?

Yeah, I”ve been busy. Or maybe I shifted from blogging about neat web sites to… crap, I am an excuse machine.

I’ll come back to it- but in short the idea that blogging is only something that happens in a blog site is what I aim to challenge later this year.

So for the next week (at least, I might go longer), I’m prowling other blogs, anxious to see if they are shuttered ghost town as the pundits claim. I’m not relying on any comment tracking tool, since, well they never work. Instead, I will do some delicious tagging of where I leave my tracks– using tags of 2010 and commentblog to track my own activity — http://delicious.com/cogdog/2010+commentblog. This embedded feed will change as i do my stuff….

So if you want me to write all over your blog, leave me a link and comment below (spammers need not apply).

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mondopiccolo

I’ve got nothing more to say (here) til February 21.

It seems pretty simple. If I post an image on flickr, I go there (or get an RSS feed) to see what comments have been added. If I want to see what people said in response to my blog posts, I go here (or again, read my own feed). Same for YouTube.

Any place online I post some media, it makes sense that that is the place to find out what people (in my case, I am just hoping that someone notices) say in response.

Not anymore when media gets reposted in other places via feeds.

For example, the networking Plaxo (which I visit about 4 times a year) subscribed to my flickr feed, so all my photos are republished in Plaxo, like this one originally posted in flickr:

What is really shoddy, and actually violates my flickr creative commons license (by attribution). is that plaxo does not provide a link or credit to the source image. But that’s beside the point- when someone comments on my flickr photo as published in Plaxo- the comment stays in Plaxo. The source media has no connection to the comment made on another site.

More? In Facebook, where I have no idea ever how I set things or enabled them, somehow I managed to have my blog republished there as Facebook “notes”

Unlike Plaxo, at least Facebook provides a link at the bottom for View Original Post– though it does pass it through a Facebook redirect URL where it is storing those micorbits of your click activity for who knows what purpose.

But again, should someone post a comment to this “note”, which was not created in Facebook, the comment is kept inside the Great Wall of Facebook. The original source of the content, my own blog, does not know of any comments posted on it in Facebook.

The same goes for FriendFeed, where you can generate a stream of content from many of your online publishing sources:

Like Vegas, comments made in FriendFeed stay in FriendFeed. I’ve not been plying too much time in FriendFeed, but it does seem to provide something close to a place to see the comments on your content in one place.

So while content is easily ingested into other sites by the elegantly simple format of RSS, there seems to be little in the way of structuring or feeding of comment data back to the source (yes, I know there are feeds for comments from a few places).

It just seems wrong to me that commentary on my content is not connected back to the source.

So I dream of an internet perhaps invented by Tony Hirst where all the data is structured, interchangable, and flows back and forth in smooth motions.

Until then, we have commentary/conversations/comments about media as detached orphans and likely need some Hirst-like hacks to coalesce them (how’s that for a request, Tony?).

Plaxo let me add appropriate links for it to syndicate in my blog feed, flickr, etc that it publishes as a “pulse”- more than just the feed content, it actually publishes my full content. That is not the smelly part, though they do make the links to the real content rather small and obscure way down at the bottom.

It’s how they handle comments. If someone comments on my flickr photo as it is rendered in Plaxo– the comment goes inside Plaxo. This morning, I got a comment from a former colleague to my ACDC in Excel post (why is it the silly posts get the comments)… and that comment is inside Plaxo (behind a login) not on my blog.

No, I did not get a comment. I got an email that said, “Someone commented on something you said” and a link.

Comment notification without the comment text (so I can decide if it is worth my time to go read) is a strategy right out of the 1990s- “sticky” web sites? Trapping users inside your site?? Blecchhhh. When I think of “sticky” I think of stepping barefoot in dog poop or chewing gum. So their comment notification scheme is right out of the last decade. Brilliant. Bring back the blink tag and some animated GIFs and they will be set.

But I am not going to leave a comment on MY blog post that is published on MY site inside THEIR website. There are plenty of openAPIs to allow comments to get to my blog, or they might have used trackback or something.

I don’t care if my blog posts are inside Plaxo. But as a stand, I refuse to post my comment replies to MY content inside THEIR walled garden.

Sorry Richard, I’d love to have a dialogue and respond to your question (and I may just because I now you) but I am not going to do it inside a stinky flawed web strategy.

Greeeeeee, gotta go chase a cat or chew up a slipper to relieve my tension.