More on Talkdigger (can you tell I'm excited?). I checked out the feeds that it gives for a conversation that's being tracked, and was delighted by the level of discovery there. Talkdigger will automatically find pages that point to a particular conversation (e.g., a blog or a particular blog post). That info is available in the Talkdigger interface, or through the RSS feed of sources (that's RSS 1.0, of course). Here's a look at what the feed gives (viewed in Sage plugin for Firefox). I'll pick on Gardner Campbell again:

Here's a view of the whole list of sources:

What we've got is a feed of pages that link to Gardner Writes. The system isn't perfect--it picks up uninteresting links and links that from particular posts in the blog itself--but for a process of discovery it does a lot of work. The feed aggregator will open up many routes of exploration for other interesting sources. If I find that a source is particularly interesting, I would then go back into Talkdigger and add it to my list of conversations to track. Here, I'm interested in Access Technologists. I give it a peek, and see that Gardner Writes is on their blogroll with a link to the general Gardner Writes blog (not a particular post). That's not surprising, since the conversation in Talkdigger I started with is identified by the the URL to the general blog (as opposed to the URL for a particular post).

Fantastic and exciting developments in one of my favorite worlds, that of rdf and the semantic web! I haven't had a chance to surf around and read material for a while, so there's too much for one blog post and I'll get to them all eventually. The big ones to know about are version 3 of Piggybank, the SIOC ontology (where was I that I missed this coming up?!?), and Talkdigger.

Talkdigger makes a nice move in describing itself as "Semantic Web Ready." It's an apt description, I think, in pointing up the new ways of envisioning the relationships between content on the web that the semantic web will bring while tacitly acknowledging that it's not in the air yet. But with Talkdigger, we're getting to liftoff velocity.

Talkdigger lets users pick out a conversation taking place on the web by focusing on a URL that's a node in that conversation. It then searches around, both in a general web search and within other conversations already in the system, for other nodes in the conversation and starts putting together the relationships between them. In that way it is similar to co-comment (I confess I haven't used co-comment, though, so I hope someone who has will help make the comparison). It uses the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) ontology to produce the connections. The result is a way to make connections between online conversations and the people producing them.