Comments on: Comments, Comments, Comments

By: murcha

murcha — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:58:44 +0000

Comments are so important to bloggers. However, sometimes I read blogs, enjoy, leave them and move onto other blogs to read and forget about commenting or just do not make the time to do so. However real conversations can take place, extra knowledge gleaned and a new social network established. It helps you understand who is reading your blogs and why and can often add to the depth of a blog. For students it is a wonderful means of showing that there is an authentic audience for their work. The content of those comments will often trigger explorations on the topics mentioned and encourages self education. Comments can be highly motivational.

By: Miss Profe

Miss Profe — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:46:49 +0000

Hi, Graham. It’s been awhile. ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

The thing about commenting is, at least for me, is that I say some of my best stuff at times in comments, and then I think, “Wow, that would be a good post to blog.”

Still, I don’t get around the blogosphere as much as I would like.

BTW: I like the stats you compiled. And, you’re not wierd.:)

By: Graham Wegner

Graham Wegner — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:11:42 +0000

@ken - don't know about soul-crushing, but it was probably my OCD streak coming through once I started checking the comments. Plus I needed to find some stats of some description for Dan's latest comp. This is what I do in the evenings instead of watching TV and as the pressure of the school year is still a fortnight away, it's the only time to indulge in something as deliberately tedious as analysing comments!!

By: ken

ken — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:26:26 +0000

A top ten list, eh? Of people who comment, eh?

Did you ever stop to think that counting comments, subscribers, and trackbacks can become an all-encompassing, soul-crushing investment of time?

Anyhow, I’d post more, but I need to see my stats @ Feedburner.

By: Sarah Stewart

Sarah Stewart — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:54:34 +0000

Same here, Sarah.

By: Kerrie Smith

Kerrie Smith — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:47:27 +0000

One of my belated New Year’s resolutions Graham is to pay more attention to what people are saying and to comment on their blogs more. I am impressed by the fact that you have been blogging for over 2.5 years and I do monitor what you say

By: Sue Waters

Sue Waters — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:42:05 +0000

Wow – full credit to you for taking the time to add them manually. Now that would be a cool statistic if you could get it done automatically. While I was doing the 31 Day Project I subscribe to feeds from Technorati and Google Blog Searches – so can confirm that adding technorati tags doesn’t do much. But when you remember it is worthwhile using variations of the keyword within your post, provided it doesn’t distract from the post, as it will be found by technorati. However saying all that a lot of people are now relying on links to posts in Twitter rather than using Feed Readers – oh the joys of changing goal posts.

By: Jo McLeay

Jo McLeay — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:24:26 +0000

Hey Graham, so glad to be included in your top ten list, even if it was just by a whisker. So glad in fact that it has inspired me to write another comment. Keep up with the commenting and the analysis. It’s interesting. I use cocomment to track mine

By: Graham Wegner

Graham Wegner — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:58:21 +0000

Sue, I have to admit that I added them all up manually. Pretty boring, hey. I agree that Technorati tags seem a lot of trouble for what they supposedly achieve – when I get to the end of writing a post, I just want to hit “post” and get it out there.

By: dswaters

dswaters — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:57:21 +0000

Okay Graham you have me pondering. Did you manually have to total up the number of comments by each individual or was there a faster way?

In terms of commenting I also use co.mments (http://co.mments.com/) and I send the feed through my RSS reader which makes it easy for me to respond back. Since I started using it in August I have posted over 340 comments. Co.mments is really easy to use – just drag the bookmark to the Firefox web browser.

Don’t stress about Technorati tags. Technorati searches for the term within your blog post so even if you have not used the tags it will find your posts. As you say Blogline beta now includes the comments but with the number of posts I read, although comments are important, I don’t have time to read posts and all the comments.