One of the things on my ”to do” list is to spend some time exploring some of the Web 2.0 services that I haven’t yet tried out. I’m already a regular user of sites including Bloglines, Flickr, Wikipedia, Technorati and, of course, Wordpress, but I’ve yet to fully explore the potential of others. Del.icio.us, Rollyo and Writely are just a few that I want to explore in more depth.

My first port of call is going to be Web2logo.com, which I came across via Micro Persuasion. The site displays logos for Web 2.0 services, with each one linking through to information, news, traffic stats and user ratings on the service. Each service is tagged which means you can browse Web 2.0 sites that centre on bookmarking, search and photo services, amongst other categories.

Lorelle on Wordpress features lots of interesting resources and tips on how to make the most of blogging on the Wordpress platform. Earlier this week she posted a blogging challenge to encourage people to post comments on blogs. She gives some sensible advice on commenting on blogs too, such as making sure that what you say adds to the conversation, and showing that you”ve read and understood the original post.

Like many people, I only comment on a small number of the blogs that I read regularly. There are some I’ve been reading for a year or more without ever leaving a comment. This behaviour is known as ”lurking” - a term that was originally used to describe people who read discussions in around online communities or message boards without actively participating by posting messages themselves.

Sometimes you need a push to move from passive to active engagement, and I’m using Lorelle’s challenge as mine. For the next few days I’ll be finding opportunities to post my first comments on blogs I already read regularly, and I’ll also be taking time to dip into other people’s blogrolls and hopefully discover some new regular reads. When the week’s up I’ll update this post with links to the posts I’ve commented on.

If anyone else needs a push towards joining in the conversation on blogs they read, why not take part too?

The Editors, part of the BBC blog network, recently featured an interesting post about redesigning the Newsnight website. It’s a call to action from Newsnight editor Peter Barron, who asks readers to let him know what they like and don”t like about the current website via the comments. He says:

“Let us know what you love and hate, what you visit all the time, what you never visit but are glad is there…Do you want to read long articles, view video, download podcasts or talk to each other?…And are there features we should quietly put out of their misery?…The pruning shears are in your hands”.

The post has generated some good comments and suggestions, about navigation and structure on the homepage, improving accessibility and suggestions for new content and features. By asking these questions through The Editors blog, Newsnight has managed to reach a highly-engaged audience and therefore achieved a level of feedback and insight that can be difficult to solicit through a standard online survey.

I like this approach to gathering feedback from users and assessing website performance, and can see a role for it alongside other mechanisms like website analytics, surveys, focus groups and user testing. The informality of the ”comments” approach lends itself particularly well to gathering frequent, ongoing feedback, as well as testing out new ideas.

Update: The revamped Newsnight website launched at the end of August. A post on the Newsnight blog says: “Many raised similar themes and we’ve tried to incorporate or reflect most of them. The result is, we hope, less cluttered, clearer and much easier to navigate. And, as many of you requested, we’ve killed the GorDaq”.