Robert Stanke.com

This past weekend, as I was taking a quick cruise through Twitter to see if anything big was happening, I stumbled across a tweet by Tim Bursch, who I just recently started following a couple of weeks ago.  His comment was in regards to whether or not his followers merely just read blogs and tweets or actually engaged in conversation.  I replied back to him stating that I always try to comment on blogs I read because I want to help foster that interaction and two-way communication.  In fact, looking back, I blogged about this very topic last April.  Now that Tim has re-surfaced the thought for me, both on Twitter and in his blog, I thought I would touch on it briefly again.

Besides the obvious connection of being able to tie traffic back to your site, commenting on other blogs starts something that has been missing in the later half of this Web 2.0 world... conversation.  By definition, Web 2.0 was suppose to be the world of interaction and having the ability to comment on web pages.  Discussion boards took off, blogs got started, YouTube came, Twitter came... the list goes on and on.  It is hard to find one site out there now-a-days that doesn't have some element of commenting or sharing!  These sites that started the "conversationalist period" are now experiencing a lack of contributors, however.  It seems that everyone just wants to watch and listen, but not jump in the conversation.  Perhaps because the web has become so overwhelmed with blogs and Twitter accounts and videos that we consume too much to be able to take the time respond to it.  Or... are we letting our marketing instincts take over and just worrying about broadcasting our own message all of the time?  Sometimes I feel the latter is occurring.

One of my goals for 2010 was to take the time to visit more blogs - new ones and old ones - and really take the time to offer up a "thank you" or a "have you thought about this..." comment.  I feel we need to start the conversation back up!  I hope a majority of my readers feel the same.