Okay, I admit it - all this talk about 'conversation' and the 'Holy Web 2.0' recently here has made me really start thinking about the subject of reader feedback again. Because the fact is that I love hearing from readers, and having them be part of the conversation going on here; I do have a very high opinion of my readers, after all, and each time that I actually meet one in the real world, they always turn out to be just so intelligent and entertaining and interesting themselves. And I'd love to have a way for my readers to be able to discuss among themselves, too, instead of waiting for me to see if I might happen to mention their thought here at a later time; and there have been a lot of you over the years, too, who have written in and mentioned how much you'd like this as well. And most blogs, of course, do this by having a comments section, and being done with it; but I can't do that here, see, because I have a bunch of people who really hate me as well, and anytime I've tried to run commenting here in the six and a half years of maintaining this website, it's gotten so flooded with nasty little anonymous trolls so quickly that I've had to take it down again 24 hours later.

I like that there's an extra step involved with submitting comments to my site; that you have to sit down and write an entry at your own blog to do so, or link to something at del.icio.us and add a 'jasonpettus' tag. It's just enough work, I've found, to discourage most of the people who would otherwise with a commenting system be leaving anonymous shit like 'U FUCKIN SUK PETTIS.' The extra step tends to make the people who actually follow through be a lot more thoughtful, even if they still disagree with what I'm saying vehemently; and to be clear, I never mind when someone hates my opinion, as long as they can intelligently explain why. And in fact this option has been around since blogs have been around, and there have indeed been a lot of people who have left a lot of comments about me at various blogs all over the Heterotopia.

The problem for many years, though, and the reason this was never a real option for real-time feedback like commenting is, is that there was no good way to collect up these entries from all over the blogosphere quickly, and parse them into what they were talking about. I mean, sure, you've had search engines this entire time, but they used to not work that well, and it could sometimes be days or even weeks before you'd get notice there of a response someone had made to you. But with the rise of such open protocols as RSS and tagging, suddenly it is possible to gather up these blogs from all these wildly different companies, and aggregate their content quickly at a central location (say, Technorati, for example, my favorite - or Digg, Memeorandom, Google Blog Search and more). And now you suddenly have this option of near-real-time communication between the blogs themselves, eliminating the main reason so many people turn commenting on at their blogs in the first place. It allows for the same conversation as comments at a blog does, in an uncensored way that the owner can't control, simply with a neutral central location tracking the conversation, the participants logging in their comments remotely from their own personal location.

So I've been setting up things on my end so that this communication will be easier, and I think now that the following four ways are the complete list of how to now bring your comments, thoughts, recommendations and the like to not only my attention, but to my readers' as well:

1) You can, like I said, write a response at your own blog. There are 27 million of you out there now, according to Technorati. And in that case you can do either of two things to bring it to my attention, or both to be on the safe side: you can hyperlink to this site, or you can add the tag 'jasonpettus.' And that way, you can write as little or as much as you want, and have it all enfolded into the usual content you've providing for your own readers anyway, and can share your thoughts with them and with my readers at the same time, without having to type the whole damn thing in twice. And then if you've "claimed" your blog at a place like Technorati (that is, proven that you're the real owner of that blog), your entry is added to their database not even ten seconds after you publish it yourself, via pinging; which means that it shows up in my RSS reader a maximum of 15 minutes later. So that will easily let you get a comment to me in time for me to talk about it in the next day's entry.

2) If you don't maintain a blog, or have just a tiny little comment to make, you can always bookmark an entry instead, at one of these public social-bookmarking services, and add the tag 'jasonpettus' there as well, along with the comment you want to make. I use del.icio.us, for example, owned by Yahoo, the biggest of the dozens of such services in existence right now. And that's the beauty of these open protocols, of course - that even a place like that offers RSS feeds too, so that too will show up in my feed reader a maximum of 15 minutes after you first post it. So this is a great option, for example, if you had just one quick thing you wanted me to ponder, a quick correction, a related URL you think my readers and I should check out, etc. And of course this is a great way to point me to things you just think I might be interested in, too, or that you'd like me to write a journal entry about, or an artistic/entrepreneurial project you're involved with.

3) If you don't want to do either of these things, of course, but have a microphone built into your computer, you can always now leave me an audio comment as well. Oh, and man, I've had this option up for like a week now, and not a single damn person has taken advantage of it yet! So frustrating, I tells ya! If I saw something like this at someone's site, I would be genetically compelled to click right over to it, and try it out. (In fact, that's how I learned about it in the first place, was through the personal blog of Evan Williams, co-founder of Odeo.) So anyway, as a little inspiration for those of you on the fence out there, I made a new recording myself at Odeo (my first official one at Odeo, in fact), talking about all this and recommending some things you might talk about, if you're having a hard time answering such a question yourself.

If I did it right, and if you have Flash Player, you should be seeing a real-time player now right above this, courtesy of Odeo. And that's super duper cool, I think, because the whole thing's run off Flash, which means that you don't need any particular proprietary software on your end (QuickTime, WMP, iTunes, etc), and I don't have to offer a zillion different formats on my end either. Given that my podcast episodes are always five minutes or under (today's, for example, is 3:30), I figured that some of you might just want to listen to it while here visiting, and not have to go to the trouble of downloading it, sending it to your iPod, listening to it and then deleting it again; so it's cool, I think, that Odeo offers this simple way to do that, in a format that they claim will work on 96 percent of all computers with broadband connections. So we'll see, I guess. (Oh, don't worry - you can right-click here to just directly download the MP3, too, if you do want to send it to your iPod and listen on the go. And that version has notes, pictures and ID3 tags, too! You see the kind of trouble I go to for you, people?) Anyway, I'll be able to share your audio comments like this as well - as an onscreen player and as a downloadable MP3 - so start sending 'em in!

4) And if you don't want to do any of these fucking things, you can always do what people have been doing for the last six and a half years - drop me an email! I try to get back to everyone who writes in, although I'll warn you in advance that that can sometimes take a very long time (months and months, sometimes, although with my new home connection I'm hoping to speed that up). At the very least, if your comment is timely I'll usually post it here at the site a day or two later, if I think it's worth passing along to my readers, with of course your name always withheld unless you specifically say it's okay to mention it. (And always feel free to say, "Don't reprint this email at all," if you're feeling especially paranoid.)

One of the cooler things about all this, though, is that these protocols for tracking are publicly available as well, which means that any reader who wants to can follow along too. I mean, you can go over to Technorati right this second, for example, to see what everyone in the blogosphere is saying about me; and there isn't anything I can do about what shows up there, which disproves the argument I often hear, that I'm attempting to stifle people's free speech by not having commenting here. And even cooler, search results like that at most of these places come with their own RSS feed as well, so you don't even have to keep going back to that site and keep making the search; just subscribe to the feed (in your reader, through your email, at your MyWhatever homepage), and have everyone's comments sent to you in real time. And even cooler than this, such a thing means you no longer have to keep track of each and every comment page at each and every blog entry you're interested in tracking; all comments about me, all responses to all entries, come in under one feed with such a system, meaning you miss none of it. And perhaps the coolest thing of all, it's a completely opt-in system; so if you're a little Pettus junkie, you can subscribe to the feeds and see everything that everyone is saying; but if you couldn't really give a shit, then you never have to visit those places at all, and in the meanwhile are not bombarded with 120 "U FUCKIN SUK PETTIS"s at the bottom of the page here either.

Okay, so the tools are up; and I do hope that some of you might actually start taking advantage of them! Lots of you over the years, after all, have asked me if I might set up a way for readers to start a conversation amongst themselves, regarding the topics I talk about here; of what an interesting thing you think that might be, that would lead to some really intriguing exposition. And I agree, man! So I hope that all of you will start using these tools, whenever you feel like adding a little thought to the conversation yourself.

Okay, so how about a little prod, since we're on the subject, in case you can't really think of anything to send a comment about? I've got a little dilemma on my hands these days, and I want some advice...

There's this website I follow called Ning, one of those "much-hyped" places started by a guy who was already famous in the tech world beforehand. And I admit, the concept is great - it's the host of free social applications, designed in a way so that just about anyone who wants to can build one for free, without knowing hardly any programming at all (or so they claim). Yeah, sure, sounds cool to me! So I read their blog, and I visit semi-regularly and the rest. I've discovered something pretty quickly about the place, though, which is what's causing them to get made fun of so much these days by others in the tech industry, and their doom foretold so much; I can't think of anything actually cool to make, and neither can anyone else there. Which is a shame, I think, because the concept itself holds so much potential; but right now all there is there is a bunch of crappy 'Am I Hot Or Not" ripoffs, a couple of things that might be cool if they could actually get more than 75 people to participate, and not much else.

So - what kind of social application would you like to see existing out there? If your idea strikes my fancy enough, I'll build it; that's the whole point of mentioning it, after all, is that I want to try building an app at Ning, but simply can't think of anything interesting to build. Just so we're all on the same page - I'm defining "social app" here as something that relies on an entire community of users to work, with those users connecting with each other through things like shared interests, shared professional goals or experiences, attraction to each other, all of it helped along profoundly through such technology as tags, lists, photo galleries, RSS feeds, email capabilities and the like. Flickr is one such social app; MySpace is another; wikis are yet another. And in my case, I'm looking for an idea that will already provide plenty of value, even to the first 30 or 40 people who join; because that's the problem with the few actual good ideas at Ning, is that they're only good once you have maybe 10,000 users or over, and so far no one's managed to get more than a couple of hundred. So Flickr, for example, is a good example of this; because even if their total membership was 30 or 40 people, if each of those people were uploading new stuff regularly, and tagging them thoroughly, there'd still be plenty of reasons to show up each day.

Send along your thoughts via any of the four methods described above, and I'll discuss what I heard on Monday.

A random thought, after seeing the new trailer for the upcoming A Scanner Darkly:

I like that Philip K. Dick is getting more and more popular, and recognized more and more as the genius he actually was. But then part of me, of course, feels like something special and secret is getting ripped away from me at the same time. I remember reading my first Dick novels, back when I was maybe 17 or so and first starting to get into subversive literature for the first time - Orwell, Vonnegut, Dick, the teenage classics, you know. I remember thinking of what a wonderful little dark secret I had discovered when first reading Dick, how pleased I was that I had picked it off the shelf, just because it had had a weird title like Flow the Policeman's Tears or whatever. As teens, I think, we really hold these artists much more tightly to our chests, much more make our love of them part of our actual identity, feel like it's this special bond we share with this weirdo little underground artist who no one has ever heard of, and which will get you strange looks when you read them in public. And you kind of lose a little bit of that when suddenly everyone knows who Dick is, and Spielberg is making movies out of his stories and all. But still, I am glad that he's starting to get the recognition he deserves, because he really is one of what I'd say the top-10 brilliant writers of the 20th century. Oh, and fffuuuuucccckkkkkk, that Scanner Darkly film looks so good, man.