On the schedules printed for distribution at BlogWorld, one session was missing: Are Bloggers Losing Control? The New World of Distributed Conversations & Comments. It was lead by Stowe Boyd, Ted Corman, Louis Grey, Greg Narain and Brian Solis.

For those who were at BlogWorld and missed it due to that, it was a really great session. And not just because I got to tease the guy next to me that the low attendance was actually his fault. You see, he’s brought in a personal size pizza and was eating lunch. I told him obviously the smell of food had made everyone who had attended the previous session decide to go eat rather than stick around.

At start time we had something like 5 people in there. A few more trickled in, then everyone who was on Twitter at the time was asked to start tweeting to get more people in there. I don’t know how many of the others who showed up were due to that, but the numbers were still far, far lower than any of the other sessions I attended.

No, I didn’t tweet it. No laptop computer and let’s just say my cell phone plan is old. I’ve never used it for texting of any sort. However, you can see what people did tweet during the session by searching Twitter for #add. Scroll down because they have been pushed down by other tweets tagged that way. And of course these will get pushed further down as the days go by.

OK, so the crowd was small. What HAPPENED during the session?

I know, I know. The small crowd doesn’t matter so much as the information, which was amazing. I have 3 pages of notes to go through on this one. Things did ramble a bit off to the side of the topic at times, but it was still great.

The basic problem many blogs are facing these days is that their comments are going to other sources, such as Twitter and Friendfeed. Many bloggers say their comments are down by half.

The news isn’t all bad, though. These comments can drive more traffic and increase your overall community of readers. Your work is being exposed to a wider range of people than just those who had already discovered your site, and they’re being introduced by people they trust: friends on these networks.

This is considered by some to be the transition from Blogging 1.0 to Blogging 2.0.

Blogging 2.0 means your users are going to comment where they’re most comfortable. People may see your blog as the conduit, rather than the destination.

One of the considerations they suggested is whether or not it’s a positive to go from considering web pages to web streams. The distribution of comments means there are more ways for people to discover what you’ve written, but it’s harder for you as the blog owner to discover what people are saying and to participate in the conversation.

Should you try to participate in all the conversations?

There are good points to trying to participate in as many of the conversations as you can. It becomes clear that you care, and you can deal with misunderstandings.

On the other hand, finding all these conversations is time consuming, as is keeping up with them. You do have to think about how much time you can afford to spend on this. Think about how you’re going to follow all the conversations that can go on about your site away from it. Do you really need to care about all of them? Think about if quality or quantity of relationships matters the most to you.

Backtype was suggested as one way to find the conversations. It allows you to follow individuals, as identified by their URL. It’s not perfect, but if you want to see what a particular person has been talking about online, it can find them across various blogs.

Summize, the Friendfeed search tool and Yahoo Pipes were also suggested. Summize is now owned by Twitter.

A very good point made was that this is very much an in-crowd phenomenon. So if you’re getting hit hard, congratulations! Your readers are taking up the new technology very quickly.

But if you aren’t seeing this, you should still be paying attention. Just think of how fast things can go from unusual to mainstream in the online world. How long do we have?

It just depends. I was talking to Wendy Piersall after the session, and she said her comments are already way down. Lynn Terry said hers are up.

As for me, well, I rarely get a ton of comments so I really can’t say. Maybe I should blame distributed commenting just for fun.

Seriously, I won’t, because at this point it’s very much worth my while to keep building up my readership and the comments on this site. It does no one any good to pretend there’s no problem if there is one.

My suggestion, if you’re having a drop in comments, would be to check and see if distributed commenting is the problem. Use the tools mentioned. See what you can find out. You need to know if it’s a distributed commenting issue or something else going on. Assumptions are not your friend.

What options do we have?

A change like this wouldn’t be getting interesting without some tools to push things along. One such would be Disqus, a universal commenting system that has been around for close to a year.

The basic idea with Disqus is that they provide a universal way for visitors to comment on sites using their system. It works with Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type and TypePad. You get threaded comments, and your blog joins a community of other blogs that have chosen to use Disqus. It also handles the spam for you.

Each of your post becomes its own forum, and Disqus allows you to sync your comments section to it.

For users, it’s having a single login and a reputation that can be built across several blogs that can be an advantage.

Judging by the comments about Disqus on StumbleUpon, lots of people love this system, a few HATE it. Always good to know what people think about a system before you consider working with it.

This and other systems are still very much in development, and the panel had some good points that you should consider. The big one is “who owns the data?” which should matter tremendously to anyone choosing to use an outside service for their comments.

They also pointed out that these are very early days. When the telephone was new, you had to be on the same system as the person you wanted to call, or you couldn’t reach them. When texting was new, you had to subscribe to the same service as the person you wanted to text. Judging by these examples, the panel expects something similar in time for distributed commenting.

As I said, I learned a lot in this session. This was the topic I knew the least about, so it was generally fascinating. Definitely my favorite session overall.

What can I say but that I had an absolute blast! BlogWorld was utterly exhausting but really educational and I got to make a few new friends. I’ll be posting over the next few days on some of the things I learned.

One of my favorite sessions - and did I ever take notes! - wasn’t listed in the printed schedule available at BlogWorld. It was on the online one that I had printed out at home, so I was one of the few to know about it until people started posting on Twitter about it.

These kinds of things can be really overwhelming, and I sure wish I had a laptop. Would’ve really simplified the note taking, not to mention the chronic urge to blog. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be away from a computer for days when you’re used to spending significant chunks of most days on it?

Well if you’re like me, you probably do.

There were two things that were challenging for me. The first was simply dealing with some hip pain due to my current pregnancy. Not much to be done for that, but it ensured that I went to a lot of sessions. Great excuse to just sit down.

The second was more important. It’s hard to network when you’re no longer used to crowds of people. It’s been AGES for me since I’ve had to deal with more than a small group, and frankly things were overwhelming at times. But the time before and between sessions were nice for just talking to to people in the same room. After all, if you’re in the same session, coming up with something to talk about is pretty easy.

Choosing sessions to go to can be tricky. There can be many great titles available. But don’t bother going to too many on similar topics. There were a ton of them on monetization, and while earning money is nice there’s a lot more information you need in order to succeed.

Besides, the basics of many of the monetization sessions were to first try selling something of your own, preferably your own products, but ad sales as well, then affiliate marketing, with AdSense down on the bottom if you just need a way to earn money.

The exact details varied, of course, but you can experiment with those and see what works best for you. Some did find affiliate sales to work better than selling their own products.

When your schedule and budget allow, go to one of these conferences. I found it to be highly rewarding.

I’m pretty excited to finally be able to go to such an event. I’ve been trying for ages to get into one industry event or another, but my plans have always fallen through.

I finally got everything to go smoothly for attending BlogWorld.

The one thing slowing me down was waiting to find out if my husband could get the weekend off work. Wouldn’t you know, his 6 weeks training at the new job ends a full week before BlogWorld. For various reasons, we want him to normally work weekends. Yet you obviously don’t want to be making too many scheduling requests on a new job.

Fortunately, his boss thoroughly approves of our taking a trip. Helps that the new job is in the travel industry.

So I have my pass reserved as well as hotel room. Don’t need to rent a car because I’m bringing my husband, and we’re close enough that driving makes more sense than flying, especially with the ticket prices I found online.

I know time’s going to fly, but September 20 seems far away now!

Looks like the list will include me, although I haven’t made my reservations quite yet. Waiting to hear if my husband can come along. He’ll probably just play in Vegas while I’m busy, but he still wants to be there.

Can’t say I blame him. Vegas is fun.

So today I wait to see what his new job says. Can he get time off and join me? It’s not precisely time off since it would just mean he’d work the whole week instead of the two weekend days plus 3 days of the week, but that difference may matter.

But whether I go with him or alone, it’s a trip I am much looking forward to. A chance to meet other bloggers. A chance to learn new things. And quite likely a whole lot of fun.

Anyone else going?