One of the coolest things about blogs is that they can get indexed almost immediately after they're posted.
Services such as PubSub and Technorati
make it easy for people and companies to find blog posts that mention something.

This means that I can, say, mention Platial and get this comment from someone who works at Platial:

Thought I'd share a couple of other uses for social mapping/place annotation.

On Platial, primarily people are using tags as a way to find functional places like platial.com/tag/donut or based on interest like platial.com/tag/burningman

But they're also saving Places and making maps based on common interests like machinima http://platial.com/lolly/map/4922#Machinima or birding platial.com/kclama

It's still very early but the idea of allowing maps to be personal is showing us new ways to use Platial every day. It's a familiar metaphor that excites people. We get people plotting where they were married, broke up and had their first kiss. It's pretty incredible to see all of this rich annotation around the world! Thanks Sacha.

As numerous speakers pointed out during mesh: the conversation is happening out there in the blogosphere. The only question is: do you want to join it? Are you keeping track of what people are saying about you, and are you responding?

Who's been particularly keen at that? The Blinklist guys always turn up whenever I mention it. I got some Google love when I blogged about their recruiting talk at U of T (probably name-based searches). Heck, I read every single blog post in the IBM internal blogosphere, and I keep track of all the posts related to social bookmarking there. Fun stuff.

Can _you_ hear the people out there?