Interesting to use a post on distributed conversations to show how distributed conversations work. But we think it’s informative. Alan started this process description, but for our own clarification, we’re going to deconstruct our own. It seems very chaotic as we look at it now, but in practice it’s pretty flow like. The key, seriously, is years of doing it, of learning how to “join loosely” with these ideas and be very much ok with the flimsy connections. Hopefully some others will find this somewhat informative:

1. We read Alan’s post in our Bloglines account Wednesday morning.

2. Through a link in that post, we went to David’s original post and read through it. (Even if we hadn’t found it this way, we would have gotten it our aggregator anyway.)

3. We come back here and write our response at various points in the day, composed much like this post…15 minutes here, 10 minutes there…hard to find extended writing time.

4. Today, in our Bloglines citations, we see that Brian Lamb has linked to our post, and we click through to read his most excellent addition to the conversation that’s been started. (Again, we would have found his post in our aggregator eventually as well.)

5. Brian’s post links us to a post by Stephen Downes (who has been duly added to the top 20 in the Feedster 500 list) that says we made an important point. This makes us happy, and we click through to read Stephen’s whole post (which, once again, we would have gotten in our aggregator eventually.)

6. Back to Bloglines Citations, we find that Ewan McIntosh has also chimed in on the topic. (Again…) He asks a great question:

How can you know if your blog has started a conversation if no-one is leaving comments on your blog?

Which is what gets our head thinking about this post we’re writing right now.

7. Back again to Bloglines Citations, where we find and follow a couple of other links that lead to foreign language blogs. (Wish we knew what they were saying…)

8. A little later, checking our e-mail, we find that Alan has commented here on the original post on our site. We take a few minutes to comment back to him.

9. Later, we go back to Alan’s original post which we’ve saved in Bloglines and see that there are 10, count ‘em, 10 references to his post. Most of these are just snips or links we’ve already tapped, but we click through one to find a post by Miguel Guhlin on listservs vs. blog that mentions our RSS guide (which desperately needs an update.) Yay! We spend a little time on Miguel’s blog and realize there is some good stuff here that we might want to track, and voila, he becomes the latest addition to our aggregator. Regarding blogging, he says:

Feeling good…that’s what THIS is about. It allows us to tap into–for a short time each day–that wonderful feeling of being lost in the words, distracted. And, the addiction is getting worse…it’s not a blogging addiction, just a writing one.

Which makes us start thinking about another post we want to blog…er, write…

10. We check out David’s post in Bloglines to find 18 references! We scroll through them quickly and see that we’ve found all of them but one, and that one doesn’t add that much to the conversation.

And this is how it goes, and somehow our brain is able to make sense of it. Actually, by doing this our brain is more exercised by attempting to synthesize these ideas from the distributed conversation and make sense of it here. It’s a work out that we’ve repeated over and over, and we’re not kidding when we say we really think it’s gotten our brain in better shape. It’s active learning. And as Miguel says, it feels good too.