YackTrack Tackles Distributed Conversations

It used to be so easy to follow conversations in that quaint old world of the blogosphere - simply follow the comments and track the other blogs linking to the site to read what others were saying. But then Digg and social bookmarking services showed up and extended the conversation to other social sites.

Then Twitter arrived and roundly disrupted the entire conversation by blasting it out into a fragmented scattering of 140-character questions, ideas and comments.

The digital conversation is now truly distributed. How do you keep up?

Enter YackTrack, which aggregates our digital comments across Twitter,  Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress to create a single conversation stream. Though still in early beta, YackTrack focuses on :

As a content producer, you can search for comments on your content from various sources or other blogs that talk about your content. Granted, this may sound like it is targeted at the content producer, but it can also help the people commenting on the content themselves. If you have commented on a blog post, you can find other people that are commenting on the post and join the conversation on other sites.

I think YackTrack is definitely on the right track, and eventually, I'd love to embed YackTrack on my own blog so that you can see the entire digital conversation at the end of each post. While we're at it, perhaps YackTrack could replace the traditional comment box as an all-in-one conversation tool. Check it out and let me know what you think.