This assignment had the potential to be a tough one for me, as I have a history of regretting my entry into certain blog conversation. But it was instead made easy, as I couldn’t help but respond to a post over on heretofore-unfamiliar-to-me blog The Buzz Bin. The post in question, Open Does Not Equal Access, finds author Geoff Livingston drawing a distinction between being open to social networking and being accessible via those networks. In short, it’s unrealistic to expect that people will be accessible to you, just because they are open to you on the network. Read the post for a better explanation.

Here’s the thing: If I understand what he’s saying, I completely agree with him. If you are someone who has a policy of adding people who request friendship freely to your social networks, that’s shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as an open invitation for constant contact, free advice, or ongoing conversation. That would be an unrealistic expectation.

My trouble with the post comes early on:

Unfortunately, one by-product of social worlds seems to be a certain set of the population believes that because an individual or an entity participates in open conversation that their entire business should be openly accessible.

The “their entire business should be openly accessible” part links to my Thoughts on Managing My Social Network post. Taken at face value, I think that’s a mischaracterization of what I was saying. So my first comment on Geoff’s blog sought further clarification. Ryan Deschamps also joined in, as his blog was used in a similar fashion in the same quote presented above. I won’t rehash the whole exchange here. You can go to Geoff’s post to read it in context.

The second part of this exercise is to answer a few questions reflecting on the experience:

• What happened as a result of you disagreeing with the blogger? How did they respond? How did you respond?

My first comment was more a request for clarification than a strict disagreement. His response reinforced my initial contention that I was somehow being misunderstood, so I pushed back a bit over two separate comments. In the end, the blog’s author conceded that perhaps my message wasn’t a perfect illustration of his point, but that he valued our (Ryan’s and my) contributions to the discussion. A pretty tactful way of putting the conversation to rest, actually.

• What do you usually do if you find a post with which you disagree? Do you comment publicly? Email the blogger? Or do you just move on?

Usually, I think briefly about commenting, before thinking the better of it and moving on. I’m trying to avoid the negativity vortex.

• If you comment, typically how do you engage the blogger? Do you ask questions to better understand his/her position? Do you make statements to explain your position? Do you track comments so that you can return to continue the conversation?

I’m getting better at asking for clarification before putting my arguments out there. I try to take a step back before disagreeing with someone. And I’m only just now formally tracking those conversations, although I’ve been pretty good about remembering posts I want to revisit anyway.

• If you’re a blogger, how do you feel if people post comments where they disagree with you? How do you handle these?

It means I’m saying something worth disagreeing about, which is a good thing. I respond.

Today’s mission was to ask a question in the comments on another blog. Said questions were supposed to be “open-ended and thought-provoking.” I’ve gone ahead and asked two questions.

The first stems from a post on the Langwitches blog, in which Silvia discusses adding Technorati tags to your posts. She discusses a WordPress plugin called WP Tags to Technorati, which will do pretty much as it says: It takes the tags you enter into the Tags field in the blog post form and converts them to tags that link to Technorati. This makes sure that your post is searchable via those tags at Technorati. Except that with WordPress, you don’t actually need to use the plugin for that to happen. After a quick exchange with Silvia in her post comments, I decided to ask the plugin’s creator what I was missing. That’s pretty open-ended, isn’t it? Haven’t received a response yet.

But then I got to thinking that this wasn’t really the type of question that activity organizers had in mind as far as though provocation was concerned. So I decided to do a little better. Kevin posted a video on his blog that quickly toured the blogs he’s visited during the Comment Challenge. It got me thinking about video commenting and so I threw the following questions in his direction:

Do you think video commenting of the variety provided by Seesmic is the future of commenting? Is it the logical evolution? Does video make conversations easier or harder? Do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?

The comment hasn’t actually been moderated yet, so of course, no response either. I’ll update when I hear back from Kevin. I’d be interested in your thoughts on video commenting, but why not hop over to Kevin’s blog and join the conversation there (unless it still hasn’t actually started, in which case feel free to comment here).

So despite a fantastic day at Churchill Downs, I’m committed enough to attempt the day 3 challenge just minutes before midnight of day 4. As luck would have it, all I’m challenged to do today is sign up for a comment tracking service. I’m a little perplexed by this, in that the “how to join the challenge” instructions told you to sign up for one before you even got started.

Conveniently for me, I’ve already joined both coComment and co.mments. They are similar, yet different. coComment is slicker in that it has a handy Firefox extension that embeds a coComment interface around any comment box. This allows you to start tracking the conversation right at the point of commenting without any sort of clunky bookmarklet or other kludge that takes you away from the main task of adding to the conversation. But my initial impression is that the site on the whole is slower than co.mments, especially in actually updating conversations with new comments. I’m focusing more on coComment right now, since that’s the tool of choice for the challenge, but I’m going to keep using both tools for some discussions and therein continue my evaluation.

Playing catch-up on the Comment Challenge, we proceed immediately into the day 2 task, which is to comment on a blog I’ve never commented on before. As it turns out, I already completed this task earlier today by joining a conversation regarding strategies for organization over on Julie Strange’s blog.

But wanting to push myself at least a little, I used Technorati to look through some of the posts using the challenge tag ‘comment08′ and ended up at a post discussing Google Notebook on the Langwitches blog. I shared my way of using del.icio.us to accomplish tasks similar to those for which the author is using the Google product. A new conversation is born and perhaps a new connection forged. I’ve already found value in what is really such a simple “challenge.”

Might be playing catch-up again this weekend ’cause tomorrow’s Derby Day and I’ve got horses to see and money to lose.

First, I’m to answer the following three questions.

How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?

More this week than usual. I had a few experiences in the past where I wished I’d kept my mouth shut and that put me off commenting for a long time. I think I’m a little wiser now and know when to contribute and when to bite my tongue.

Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?

I tried coComment a few years ago, before the Firefox extension existed. I found it cumbersome to use the bookmarklet and I never really followed up on anything I marked. The current implementation is much better.

Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?

In recent history, I’ve been most like to comment on the same small group of blogs, comprised mostly of people I know well and whom I expect will get where I’m coming from. The few situations where I wished I’d stayed out of it figure strongly in that behavior.

Part 2 of this exercise is to look at Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments and assess how I’m doing in regards to the various tenets set forth. I won’t pick them apart individually, but let me point out some strengths and weaknesses with brief comments.

Tenets in which I fare well:
Stay on topic. (I’d give myself a B+.)
Don’t post when you’re angry, upset, drunk or emotional. (I’ve learned. At one point, this would have gone into the other category.)
Own your comment. (Damn skippy.)
Don’t comment for the sake of commenting. (How do people have the time?)
Do not feed or tease the trolls. (Seen enough other people make this mistake over and over again.)

Not so well:
Be succinct. (Trying. Failing.)
Remember that nobody likes a know-it-all. (Hard to self-assess on this one, but I suspect I occasionally fail in this department.)
Make the tone of your message clear. (I’ve failed in this department a few times, resulting in much more negative energies that I would have ever intended.)

So I’ve got some work to do. It only took me 15 minutes or so to run through this assessment, but it’s already been enlightening. Saying things more clearly with fewer words is my main challenge moving forward.

I’m all for a challenge, especially a challenge that encourages active engagement in the digital community, seeks to move people away from the one-way information stream and gets conversations started. So I am joining my new friends Lauren Pressley and Marianne Lenox (along with not-as-new friend Sheila Kearns) in tackling the 31 Day Comment Challenge.

The premise is simply to push bloggers who accept the challenge to be more proactive about commenting on other people’s blogs. The challenge is structured around a series of daily activities designed to gradually push you further and further beyond your normal commenting behavior. At least, that’s what I’m anticipating. The progression of the first few activities looks promising.

The group of challengers (which, as of my signing up, number 96) is using coComment to track and share the conversations they are starting. This is a good excuse for me to get back in the habit of following up on the conversations I already start on other blogs. I’d tried coComment some time ago and found it too cumbersome for me to want to use regularly. The Firefox extension makes it much simpler and much more likely that I will actually track conversations. It’s worth checking out.

I’m sure this is not the first time something like this has been attempted, but it comes at just the right time for my renewed desire to start and join conversations. It’s about to be day 3, so I’d better get crackin’. Like I said, I’m all for a challenge.