The importance of social media in the internet has increased tremendously the last couple of years. The last two blog stories include interaction between Facebook and bloggers to bring in the Secret Service and protest the continued presence of a poll on Facebook which advocated political violence. At one time links from other blogs was considered a major measure of the success of a blog, but today much of the traffic is generated from social media.
There are services such as Technorati and Google which track links from other blogs (despite problems with both). It is harder to similarly track and publicize links from social media. Facebook is especially difficult since much of Facebook consists of personal pages which are only available to one’s Facebook friends. The Sitemeter shows when someone comes to the blog from Facebook, but I often cannot tell if this is from someone clicking on a link to a blog post on my own Facebook page or from another Facebook user linking here. It is also questionable as to how to handle links from blog aggregators and some types of social media. While it is rare day that there are not links to Liberal Values on such sites, often they consist only of links and nothing which is quotable.
Twitter provides a better opportunity for tracking and publicizing links from social media. Twitter is open, compared to Facebook comments often only being available to one’s friends. The brief comments from Twitter in response to a blog post are worth adding to a blog discussion.
I’m still experimenting with ways to incorporate posts on Twitter about blog posts here into the blog. In some cases but not others, comments on Twitter generate a trackback which I’ve already been posting. Over the weekend I’ve added a couple of other features. On the left sidebar I have added a RSS feed of the most recent comments fromTwitter which the feed picks up.
There is also an additional link following this feed which goes to a page at Twisty. This page gives a historical listing of comments about blog posts which appeared on Twitter, ranking by number of entries. The page also lists those who have commented on Liberal Values the most on Twitter. Showing the variety of topics discussed here, the highest number is from someone posting as healthreformusa. Next on the list is drwhonews. Others in the list is film maker and Huffington Post blogger Lee Stranahan and writer Martin Bosworth, who also blogs at Huffington Post.
I’m just beginning to look into integrating material from Twitter. While there might turn out to be other sites I am not yet aware of, Twisty does look like a useful site. The link in the sidebar does seem to give the most information, but I also found that I receive a different list if I do a search simply for “liberalvaluesblog.” While I haven’t linked to this search on the sidebar I cannot resist adding a link here because the first entry about Liberal Values is a simple comment saying, “This guy is good.” How can I question whether Twitter provides comments which are of value?
