The Gong Show

Feature Request: Disqus Number in Tumblr Dashboard

Can someone take a couple hours out of their week to build the following for all us Tumblr addicts?

I’d love to see a Greasemonkey script that uses the Disqus API to put the number of Disqus comments a given post has into the Tumblr dashboard.

Just a little text link that says “X Comments” right next to the existing link that says “Y Notes”.

Right now I’m clicking through on posts I like to see if there are comments there, and it’s a bit annoying not knowing what to expect each time I do that.

Where Content Interaction Sparks?

Why does content get more traction in some social media sites than others?

Since Buzz launched publicly last week I have been using it to syndicating my Tumblr posts.  I’ve noticed that sometimes I get more (and better) comments in the reply threads under my syndicated posts in Buzz than I get in my own comment threads or at Tumblr.

For example, when I responded to Dave Lifson about the “innovation premium” in big companies acquiring startups (specifically, Google acquiring Aardvark), I got the following interaction around my post:

• Tumblr: 2 Likes in Tumblr, and 2 reblogs.
• Disqus: 0 Comments.
• Buzz: 12 Comments and 3 Likes.

So, the quantity of activity of this post was highest at Buzz. And additionally, Greg Cohn jumped into the Buzz thread and left a really insightful comment. So, I’d say the quality was also higher there too.

But, that’s just one example, and there are plenty of counter-examples. I wrote another post last week about the relationship between Buzz and Friendfeed. The quantity of interaction for that post was:

• Tumblr: 14 Likes and 5 Reblogs.
• Disqus: 1 Comment.
• Buzz: 0 Comments.

So, pretty much all the activity was at Tumblr in this case.

I can’t figure out why interaction around content takes off in certain places, but not others.  The only pattern I can detect is that if a conversation sparks, the conversation generally stays in the channel in which it is sparked.  In other words, if two people start replying back-and-forth about a post of mine in Tumblr reblogs, that conversation rarely jumps over to my Disqus thread, and vice versa.

But, the key question (and one that someone could build a business around) is why does interaction get sparked in the first place, and what content is best suited to spark is specific channels over other channels?

Activity/Follower Ratio in Social Services

I noticed a simple trend in social services that is obvious in retrospect, but often not well articulated.

In Twitter, I have 2089 total lifetime Tweets and 2367 Followers.  In Tumblr I have 268 total posts and 262 Followers.  In both cases, this is essentially a 1:1 ratio of activity:followers.

Now, this is just a correlation, and does not necessarily imply causation in either direction. But, there is definitely a relationship between organic interaction with a service and the followers you acquire in the service.

The key to this relationship is that the activity has to be genuine and organic.  For example if I just start spamming my Twitter account with the monotonous details of every sandwich I eat, I’ll quickly dilute my activity/followers ratio.

What’s your activity:follow ratio for various services?