Hi Aaron,
I am completely with Colin and yourself, I am just hoping that this will all work out properly in the end. In the meantime I am happy kicking types I don’t fully understand;-) The main purpose of the blog is not changed by the experimenting. I’ve found that shorter posts here make for a happier me that tweets do. (I continue to use twitter too though).
BTW I suspect that emoji in my url was the problem I used the id for the post and submitted http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?p=6382 to your webmention form and that gave me a positive result. I’ve been using emoji to indicate likes, as I didn’t like the way post kinds add the heart, but it looks like I might need a better way…