Back around 1990 or so, futurist Jeff Hallett told me that computing wouldn’t be ubiquitous until it reached the “Star Trek” phase. You know, when the interface is voice-to-voice: “Computer, recalculate and set a course to Alpha Ceti Six.” Hindering the widespread adoption—and even understanding—of social media like blogs and wikis is a fair amount of complexity. Those who have jumped in and figured it out now take it for granted and can’t understand why everyone else lags behind. RSS alone is a source of considerable confusion. In his interview with Neville and me and “For Immediate Release,” FeedBurner VP Rick Klau made this joke: “You tell an audience RSS is important and 80% of them look confused. So you explain it, and then 90% of them look confused.”

Assessing the buzz on any given topic is another source of confusion. What kind of conversation has emerged? Some terrific tools, like BlogPulse, do a good job of helping bloggers (and others) understand the buzz, but only if you make a point of visiting the site and conducting a proactive search. A new Firefox extension from Google gets a little closer to Hallett’s “Star Trek” analogy. With “Blogger Web Comments for Firefox,” any page you visit that has been commented on in a blog is identified; a box pops up in the lower right-hand corner of your screen showing one comment and providing a link to a typical Google search page that lists other blogs and websites that have referenced the page you’re on.

This is nifty on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it allows you to see comments posted to blogs about plain old web pages. For example, I had reason to visit the TiVo website this morning. When I did, I was shown a link to a blog that referenced TiVo, and a link to the full Google listings page that included 100 results. If you have a Blogger account, you can even leave a comment of your own about the page that other users of the extension can read.

For communicators, this should make it dead easy to visit your own company website pages and identify whether people are linking to it from their blogs and monitor the conversation. It’s also another reason to switch to Firefox (despite the host of problems cropping up with the recently released version 1.5).