Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?

In ten plus years of online journalling/weblogging/whatever else, the comment facility here has only been operational for about the last eight months of that time.

That was mainly because disassociated ran off hand coded static HTML files for most of the first ten years, and installing a comment feature, though possible, would have been tricky.

I was also largely averse to having comments in the first place, as some people’s experiences suggested to me “managing” comments was more trouble than it was worth, despite the availability of tools such as Akismet.

Blog comments are different things to different people though. Some people see them as a measure of their blog’s popularity, while others see them as way of promoting their blog elsewhere.

Mark Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection

I gauge the success of a post and a topic by the number of comments left on it and actively try to encourage my readers to express their thoughts. I try to join in on the conversation in the comments and I consciously keep myself from modifying or censoring comments.

Muhammad Saleem at ProBlogger, makes an interesting observation about being the first person to comment in response to a posting:

By speaking first, you can establish your influence and have a visible effect on the course the rest of the conversation takes. This is important because there is strong evidence suggesting that the order in which people speak is incredibly important in determining the impact that their opinion has.

In one of Muhammad’s case studies, he found that out of the 19 comments left, half of them contained almost the same words as the first comment. Talk about being “influential”…