Blog Talk II: Get The Comments Back!
If you are an independent blogger, you might have a deep impression of the pinch comment & response interaction. I often saw some outstanding articles with just few comments, even no comment at all. Consequently, I usually don’t click the article to read, because the accompanying content viewer has done that, and no need to click the mouse.
I’ve been doing my blog for a few years, but seldom post any comments in others’ blog. One thing is I don’t have much time, even if I posted a comment but still got few chances for communication. In this case, why bother to comment.
Another reason is that the comments were independent of my information flow, not carriable, unable to share, and with a low utilization rate. I think this is also the reason that most bloggers don’t post a comment. Especially under the current environment that informational services like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Google reader are so popular, it seems hard for me to post a comment specially for other bloggers.
On the contrary, comments of one article could spread everywhere. For example, if you are interested in an article, Google Reader could “share note” with the built-in “note” function. However, the comment can’t be integrated into the original article; neither do the comments that Twitter users post when they reproduce or RT an article; and Friendfeed had its own comment function even earlier.
What this comment-decentralization would lead to is, blog, as a content creater, becomes less competitive and can’t be the focal point of our discussion. Then how to get your comments back? This has become a key factor whether blog could get back to the top again. In my opinion, the most important factor is the sharing and carrying of information.
After Facebook released Connect service, techcrunch, the well-known tech-blog, had also improved their note system accordingly. Users could post comment by logging into their techcrunch blog; they could also comment directly via their Facebook account. And what’s amazing is the comments would appear on both techcrunch blog and Facebook status. This change has immensely risen the utilization rate of comments and users’ enthusiasm of interaction, leading to a huge increase of comments for sure. This was just a good example for all the blog platform (wordpress. etc.) and note system (disqus. etc.).
Blog Talk I: Is Blog Age gone?