By Barbara Dieu · May 16, 2008
In the article Who Comments on Blogs, and Why?, published on March 15th 2007, journalist Stephen J. Dubner (co-author of Freakonomics) admits that although he enjoys reading blogs and has quite a lot to say, he hardly ever comments. He challenges non-commenters to answer his question and gets 135 replies in the span of more than a year (last comment is from May 13th).
Incentives seem to be the cornerstone of modern life. On the Web, memes, friendship and love chains and challenges abound. In the educational arena this is exemplified by the Comment Challenge, coordinated by Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, Michele Martin and Kim Cofino.
The organizers challenge the 123 participants to be better blog citizens by engaging them in a 31-day round of activities with the aim of later tracking who is the commenter with:
Monetary prizes from coComment and other sponsors have been secured.
What do you think? Comments welcome :-)
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Jeffrey Keefer
wrote on May 17, 2008:
Bee, this was an interesting post with some intersting links. I am glad you pointed this out, as I would not have found this posting without the link as I did not have this RSS feed in the #cp2tech01 feed.
Great comments, to me, seem part skill and part marketing. Skill in that it takes effort to write a post that elicits comments, as well as marketing in that the writing is intended to create comments or otherwise encourage discussion. I have somewhat few comments on my blog, and part of that is because I am not intentionally looking for them. I do not market it or otherwise continue to hammer a certain topic where readers who are interested in a certain thread follow it on a regular basis. If people find it, fine. If not, that is fine, too.
Perhaps comments are something that are assumed to be of value, rather than the writing and creation process itself? Some people use blogs to generate revenue or increase in stature and respect within a field, and there are many other reasons for which to blog.
Perhaps a follow-up question is to see if there is a relationship between comments and blog objectives?
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Shirley Williams
wrote on May 18, 2008:
Comments on blogs often get lost or overlooked, and given aggregation or syndication of blog posts can result in dispersed conversations.
But perhaps more importantly is the fact if we are looking for conversations we should use forums, where all contributors are equal, not blogs which are more individual oriented.
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Jeffrey Keefer
wrote on May 20, 2008:
While that sounds good in theory, there are some challenges in using forums instead of blogs. Forums are often closed to the public, and thus not searchable of locatable by non-members (leading to possible problems with exclusivity and controlling information). Additionally, the more commenting I do outside of a blog, the less I can control my own words and messages (if a forum stops, a lot of the information can be lost).
I do agree with what you are saying about the challenge with dispersed conversations. For example, I would have never seen your response if I did not consciously set up a comment aggregator (I used co.mments.com) to check for other comments here. Perhaps what is needed is an easier way for us to use Comment RSS feeds, such as an RSS feed that also includes comments?
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Sylvia Currie
wrote on May 21, 2008:
Yes! Why doesn’t a tool exist for including comments in your RSS subscriptions to blogs?
I also haven’t taken the time to figure out how to keep track of all the interesting tidbits I come across, or items I post here and there. I’m sure there’s a whole bag of tricks for managing all of this but meanwhile I just let thoughts and comments float away.
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ksera
wrote on May 29, 2008:
Sylvia – coComment.com does exactly that … you can manage and keep track of all the interesting conversations that you come across or participate in on any site. Simple to use ad sign up for …
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Barbara Dieu
wrote on June 03, 2008:
Thank you Jeffrey, Shirley and Sylvia for your perspective on the subject. On the technical side, there are different ways to follow comments either by subscribing to both the entry and the comment feed (here on Dekita you can find them in the left hand side column at the bottom) or, as Ksera points out, to comments on particular posts with tools like Co-comment. It seems to me there are on some blog plugins which allow you to get the comments mailed to you. See this comment area ticking option at the bottom.
I agree with you, Jeffrey, that blogs have different objectives so the value on commenting on them will vary according to the type of conversation that is established .
My intention when writing this post was not to challenge people to make a comment like in Dubner's post but to reflect on the main reasons people comment by analyzing the comment area of his post, react to the “assumed value“of commenting as you say and question not only the marketing jargon (the lexical field of quantity/number and superlatives) used in the educational activity I linked but also the validity of a culture of incentives at school.
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