“Blogs are conversations” is the mantra of many blogging advocates and experts. The real action is in the comments, and I agree with that. The problem is that the more blogs that we follow, the more fragmented our community becomes. There could be six conversations going on today on 6 different blogs that I read and I don’t even realize it because I read through them before the conversation started (getting up early on the east coast compounds that problem a bit for the U.S. blogs that I read.)

Here’s what usability expert, Jakob Nielsen has to say in response to the notion that “it’s very important to use blogs to have a ‘conversation’ with customers.” (source: WSJ interview)

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction.

He’s talking about using blogs as newsletters and is suggesting that most customers won’t go to check out a company’s blog very often, if at all. But it’s even more of a problem with blog comments. You have to go back and check every hour to get involved in a discussion there. Sure, on many blogs you can get an email on updates, but you usually have to comment first. There’s also a cool service called co.mments that allows you to subscribe to comments on virtually any blog, but again, you have to actively subscribe, and that’s where they lose me.

We’re trying to solve that on Bumpzee, if only for the blogs in the communities served here.

For many, the most commonly used page on BZ is the “newest entries” page. It shows the most recent blog posts in the community. However, we’ve introduced, and now revamped the Active Discussions page. This page is as important as the newest entries page, and we’ve moved it up to the top nav bar.

Check it out. It’s sorted by blog posts that have the most recent comment. You can sort by BZ comments or by blog comments by clicking the header.

Also note that if you have a blog included on BZ, your blog’s comments will only appear here if you are using the most recent wordpress widgets plugin. The active widgets (bump this button and recent visitors) are what do the magic to allow BZ to keep track of the latest comments.

Don’t have a wordpress blog? Sorry about that. We’re working on a solution for other blogs as well. If you know how to get into the code-nitty-gritty of another blog platform, please let us know.

We’ve released a new version of the Bumpzee widget wordpress plugin.

There are a few new features in this plugin:

1. The recent readers/top entries widget is now included in this plugin (instead of cutting and pasting the javascript).

2. The recent readers/top entries widget has additional configuration to allow the display of visitors to be a grid instead of a single list. You can choose how many pictures to show and in how many columns. The pictures resize accordingly.

3. Most importantly, using either the recent readers widget or the bump this widget from this plugin will get your blog’s comments reported here on Bumpzee. This is a great and unique way for people to see that there is a discussion going on over at your blog, as I talked about here: where’s the discussion?

For installation instructions, see the widgets page.