I just wanted to draw attention to Adam’s technical question, posted in a comment below:
Great discussions like this one make me think there is a gap in our technology.
What I want is a metasite that only tracks conversations. It would represent the posts (including comments) relevant for any conversation sorted by time posted and post responded to, much like a threaded forum or mailing list. Does this exist? Can anyone make it?
Does anyone have a good workaround they’ve been using to keep track of this sort of thing?
To be honest, I tend to follow conversations via RSS readers and via wandering off to check out incoming links, and have therefore never looked into conversation tracking tools. On a very quick glance around (it’s amazing how motivating marking can be… ;-P), something like blogpulse’s Conversation Tracker looks designed to do something like what Adam is after.
When I entered the URL for the theoretical pessimism post at this blog, for example, it generated this. For Sinthome’s Problems of Self-Reflexivity, which was the more proximate epicentre of this discussion, it produces this. Some moments of the broader conversation drop out of these searches, perhaps because of the specific URLs with which I started – the discussions at Nate’s what in the hell… and Gabriel’s Self and World are two that come to mind…
Other ideas? How do people tend to track these things, once they start unfolding? This strikes me as the kind of thing that Kerim over at Keywords might have some thoughts on, perhaps… Or maybe GGollings or LMagee?
Rough Theory 
Here are some options. Personally I use del.icio.us and tag all my comments on other sites as “comments,” but that’s because I started doing this before these other sites cam along. Some of them look attractive.
Hi N,
Reviewing/composing essay questions at the momment and thought of you.
“Capitalism feeds off the permanence of innovation. Discuss.”
Also, could you please add a spell check function to ‘comments’ section.
Kerim – Many thanks for this (and apologies for not commenting sooner – been a zoo)!
Robert – posting on the run – but that’s lovely (I suspect students occasionally… help themselves to what I write on such things – I always wonder how their professors react… ;-P) I’ve been meaning to make posts editable… Have to work on this…
Running!