Today’s guest post was written by Dan Zarrella. Dan is a self-proclaimed social and viral marketing scientist, and his work seeks to answer the question “Why does information spread” in an analytical way. You can read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

Microblogging is the newest and probably the most viral form of self publishing to hit the web. This condensed, 140-character blogging style is less of a time commitment and therefore a faster, easier way for individuals to share their own opinions, and most importantly, share your content.

On the other side of the spectrum remains the old standard, blogging. Typically much longer than 140 characters and including various type of media, blog posts have become standard in web publishing.

There has been some integration of the two forms, mostly in the way of displaying your Tweets on your blog and Tweeting when you publish a new post, but nothing has been developed (until now) that allowed bloggers to take advantage of the most powerful function of Twitter: conversation.

Now there is. A few days ago I released the first implementation of TweetBacks, which allows a blogger to display every Tweet that links to a specific post. This is the first time the blogging gap has been bridged in such a conversational way; by allowing your readers to comment and share your post in an easy, less committed way, you encourage further conversation and spreading of your content.

My research has shown that over 70% of ReTweets contain a link to an external site; for all intents and purposes, the majority of ReTweets are a form of TweetBacks. I’ll be combining TweetBacks into my ReTweet mapping systems, to allow for a more general understanding of ReTweets. By using my JavaScript TweetBacks implementation, you can ensure that your blog and your content is also mapped in that system.