There. Everwhere. But Here.

Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb has a great look into how users consume content in one place and discuss the content in another place. Larry Dignan at ZDNet has a variety of questions we should be asking ourselves based on Sarah’s post.

The net discussion is around keeping up with all of the places discussion may take place based on the content (video/text/audio) that one produces. Sarah has a list of all of the 400 tools and methods needed to track everything related to a piece of content. I’d like to look at the topic from the content publisher side.

About a year ago when CN was only live a couple of months, I asked why Digg allows comments. Now we have even more services to attempt to follow, track and join the conversation around our content. Here are a few examples: Facebook, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller, Twitter, Pownce, Disqus, and FriendFeed.

When I took a look at FriendFeed last week, the first thing that smacked me straight in the face is that they allow comments on my content. Why? Would it be so hard to integrate my comment form into FriendFeed and let the comments reside on my content?

Sure, I lose page views, traffic, monetization of those visitors, ability to move them to a loyal status, learn more, etc. But the bigger issue is that readers to my article miss the discussion. No reader is going to hit up all of the services listed above to try to track and join the conversation. Instead all they get is my viewpoint as the author and miss what could be a variety of excellent complementary points or other views into the content.

There’s a business idea in all of this. What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose. While the new commenting services have moved commenting a bit further, centralization would spark real innovation.