Update: I’ve added a list of recent places I’ve been quoted over on the sidebar using the following tools: Furl.net to tag links as “citations” and FeedDigest to turn the RSS feed of that tag into a javascript-to HTML code snippet in my sidebar template. So now when I find places I’m quoted I can just tag them and they will apear here automatically. Pretty cool, huh?

I was excited to wake up this morning and find visitors coming in from News.com, where I was quoted in a story about the blogosphere’s reaction to the AOL purchase of Weblogs Inc. I think that’s testimony to the idea that stepping out on a limb to share your opinion about something can really be appreciated. I was concerned that readers would consider my take on acquisitions like that (“is independence no longer a viable business model?”) naive or silly. But I felt that way, so I said it, and apparently it sticks out enough in the discussion to have been quoted elsewhere. Fantastic. Admittedly I also stayed up too late last night reading about and writing that post, so early poster’s advantage might be part of it.

I thought I’d take this opportunity to share some links to a number of places I’ve been cited or linked to lately. This is the sort of thing that bloggers are supposed to be able to tell via blog search engines – technorati, pubsub, feedster, google blog search, etc. You search for your URL and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search. I’ve created a separate folder in my RSS reader titled “Rep tracking” that holds all the above search feeds and lets me know (in theory) whenever anyone else links to me. It often does work, but just as often I find out first by checking my traffic logs and seeing where visitors to my site are coming from. Sometimes traffic logs show me first and the search feeds catch up hours or days later. A combination of both methods works best for now, I believe.

This is something I set up for all my clients who use RSS as well, and sometimes I track inbound links myself for clients who don’t use RSS and just notify them of anything interesting. The blogosphere is all about interconnected conversations and rapid response and this is a key way that happens.

So, who else has been citing me or linking back to this or my old blog lately?

• Planet Ajaxian, a web site about the AJAX programming method recently added me to their blogroll. Not because I can do anything in AJAX, but presumably because I write about it sometimes and they like my blog in general. Cool. If you’re not familiar with AJAX I wrote a bit about it in this discussion of what makes up Web 2.0.
• Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web2.0 Blog at the SOA Web Services Journal sent me more traffic than anyone ever has last month and has added me to the blogroll.
• ProHipHop.com, a hip hop industry blog I’ve been in contact with about web 2.0 education.
• Harold Jarche Consulting wrote about my post titled Ten Tips For Searching Effectively, as did the cool folks over at TipMonkies and Michael Stein’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.
• Marrienne Richmond’s Resonance Partnership blog reblogged about a resource I wrote about recently.

That’s a snap shot of how you can use a blog to participate in online conversations. Linking, reputation tracking through search to RSS and traffic monitoring are all keys to that participation. But so is having something to say and not being afraid to say it.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, linking, reputation_tracking, search_to_RSS, RSS, Search, conversation, blogging, blogs