As the web evolves to become a platform for collaboration it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of all the pertinent conversations taking place.  Even the few topics that you are truly interested in might be discussed across hundreds of blogs by thousands of people everyday.  To help, new tools are being developed to organize and manage the vast amounts of information.

Blogs and social networks are quickly becoming the main venues facilitating online interactions.  While social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are self contained communities with built in tools for search, notification and collaboration, blogs are spread across multiple platforms (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad).  The wider blogosphere can be viewed as a large social network with its own tools for search (Technorati) as well as aggregation and update notification (FeedDemon, Bloglines, Google Reader).

The open nature of the blogosphere allows for the continuous development of new tools.  While feed aggregators notify users of a new post to a blog, another set of tools helps keep track of subsequent conversations that take place.  Services including Commentful and co.mments enable users to bookmark comments, Digg and Flickr submissions as well as other types of content.  CoComment, the newest service in this category, helps users keep track of their online conversations across multiple blogs.  The tool also brings up comments made by other users anywhere in the blogosphere. (Say you want to keep track of all the comments made by Denis Hancock on other people’s blogs)  CoComment is also becoming a tool for measuring buzz by bringing out topics that are generating the most conversation.

As the blogosphere and social networks gain critical mass and further develop navigation and collaboration tools it will be interesting to see where more of the conversation takes place.  While social networks provide a well integrated and easy to use suite of services targeted at the Net Generation, the blogosphere has the benefit of being a much more open ecosystem.