Figmentations

The light bulb just went on for me. I’ve recently come to discover that blog comments and references can be just as important to the dialogue or exchange of information as the original blog itelf.

That makes me wonder, when someone like Robert Scoble, who is known for monitoring 1,300 or so blogs on a regular basis, “can he really monitor the content and the extended dialogue around that many blogs?” By that I mean, not just the comments and references to the blog posts that he writes, but also the comments that are written against the blogs that he reads. It seems that some of the big boys, both Robert Scoble (see “Update 3/5/05″ of this referenced post) and Steve Rubel have already proven the former, so I wonder to what degree they do the latter. But I digress a bit here….

I mention this because I wanted to share a “six degrees of separation” moment that I just experienced. In reading comments to another person’s blog, I found some information that I needed that I wasn’t even looking for at the time. And, had I even wanted to look for that information, I wouldn’t even have known where to begin to look for it.

Here’s what I found. I had recently mentioned my frustration with already having broken links in my blog, when I’ve only been blogging regularly since about Dec ’04. And, low and behold, as I was printing out my “hard-copy” blog posts and related links as “phase one” of my blog backup plan, I learned that furl.net might just be the solution to my broken-link problem.

FYI: Furl appears to be a free way to store copies of website pages that I can then share with others. Here’s how I found about about Furl.

My Six Degrees of Separation Moment regarding Furl:

1. …from “weblogs that reference Your Blog Voice” (on Diva Marketing)…
2. …there was a reference from : “View from the Isle – Professional Blogging & Blog Consulting What’s your voice? by Tris Hussey” ….
3. …this article referenced both Toby’s “Your Blog Voice” and Amy Gahran’s blog series on posting formats/styles: Contentious: Blogging Style- The Basic Posting Formats (Series Index)…
4. …Part 4 of Amy’s series described the “list” post format/style ….
5. …then I got curious by an example there called “10 cool things to do with furl” (also written by Amy Gahran of Contentious.) And since I had never heard of furl before, I had assumed that furl sounded like the name of a cat. So I clicked through….
6. And there I found that furl was basically a free browser button that can be added on your toolbar and it allows you to create an online archive of Web pages to save for future reference. And according to Amy,
   

   “Yes, in most cases you’re actually saving the Web page to a new location – so if it gets relocated, revised, or removed later, you have a copy of the original version for future reference.”

I now plan on adding Furl to my backup routine!

So, get curious, click around, and see where those links will take you.