During my time at R*M I have been conducting a lot of research around conversations, and a site that has been of great help during this process has been BoardReader.
It allows you to search within message boards, for relevent conversations; providing you with clear and concise information that is hard to find using other search engines. After performing a search, BoardReader not only lists all the relevent threads; but also the source of these threads, the total amount of posts, links to related threads and graphs showing trends in posting activity around your search subject.
“BoardReader was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards”
Think Technorati - but for message boards.
This sounds super – as much for academic research as for my contributions to the gaiety of the R*M nation.