What is the best way to organize my interactions with bloggers -- how to find, follow, comment, track comments, know when others reference your blogs/comments, etc, etc?

 Amplifying – adding data streams

Google Reader – this tool aggregates the new blog posts to give me one online space to visit and view updates to RSS feeds I have subscribed to. These feeds include both commenting and posts. This is great for many of the diverse blogs out in the blogosphere, and I can track the activity of dozens of specific blogs.

A common way to add data streams is to add followers (you indicate you want to “follow” someone else’s data stream, either their RSS feed to their blog or comments on their posts by others, their tweets on twitter, or their podcasts. Oftentimes, in the case of Twitter, you can follow a tweet channel signified by @ to follow individuals or groups of bloggers who are all part of a group. Channels are often used for conferences, large MOOCs or online courses, and organizations. This way you can tap into dozens of individual streams aggregated together into one river.

You can also search twitter for #hashtags to view tweets related to that topic. In a previous post, I mentioned the interesting parallels between twitter and IRC/newsgroups, which used channels and tags in similar ways.

I often blog a post, then use twitter to feed-forward it to the readership that follows the @ggroulx tweet feed. I then tend to feed-forward it to within the online learning communities – in all, I let readers know I have posted by sending quick tweets in various data streams.

Attenuating – siphoning data streams

Oftentimes, the tweets from multiple groups turn into data torrents or a deluge of data, so we need to refine our strategies. We need to turn down the flow of data. I am unsure how to pinpoint data just yet from the twitter feeds, so I have to scan (jig) somewhat randomly, sometimes missing useful data. However, I tend to scan various channels such as @PLENK, @CELC2010, or @ETUG and this stems the random flows quite a bit, as just content identified by the tweeters with that channel will show up when the keyword is searched for.

On my edublogs.org blog, which uses the Word Press application, there is a filtering system for enabling owners to review and delete comments to blog posts or release them to the public. One can set up email notifications so that when someone else comments on your post or creates a trackback link (links to one of your blog posts from their own) you will be notified by email.