Quentin D’Souza is Tracking Down Educators who use Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us). His post describes the research process he used to make a list of teachers who are using the service. He said that he’s “building up the Social Bookmarking tools section of the wiki. In a recursive twist of information flow, I found this through my del.icio.us network, which is my favorite source of new information, and my default browser page. I left a comment on Quentin’s post.

Commenting on blogs, for me, is mildly scary. I feel that I’ve never gotten the hang of it. I don’t want to leave a comment that’s too long, or include too many links, or appear to be a know-it-all, and I’m never sure what anyone will make of what I say. I’ve left several comments here and there that I regret on account of their pedestrian vacuity. In meatspace, I’m not known for being talkative, but am known for my directness, and so conversation doesn’t flow with people who I don’t know well. In blogspace, as Graham Wegner pointed out a few months ago, comments are the lifeblood of blogs. So I boldly comment, and try not to worry about it.

With that in mind, I’ve “discovered” a way to use del.icio.us so that people can track my comments across the eduscape. The reason I’m publicizing this isn’t because I want people to stalk me, but because it would be interesting to see where all the conversation is, and I’m encouraging other people to consider doing the same, using myself as an example. When you read blogs with an aggregator, you don’t see the comments, and sometimes they are provocative - better, even, than the original post. A service called coComment was developed to help publicize these conversations, and I tried it, but it didn’t work for me for a variety of reasons.

A while back I started tagging the posts I commented on with a tag dedicated to that one purpose - I call it comments, for lack of a better word. I copy the text of my comment, hit the del.icio.us bookmarklet and paste the comment in the item, tag it, and I’m done. There’s an rss feed for them. I used that feed to burn a new Feedburner feed that I have listed at the bottom of my sidebar. For a while I had the comments displayed in the sidebar with a del.icio.us tagroll, but I’ve removed that in favor of the more discreet link to the Borderland Tourist feed near the bottom of the blog’s sidebar.

A side benefit of this, and maybe the most useful thing so far, is that I can subscribe to my own comments and revisit them. Until I did this, all my comments were lost into the ether.

For those in my del.icio.us network, that’s what the comments items are about. Apologies to anyone who finds the technical jargon hard to follow. Quentin’s wiki page is good background.