Yesterday I noticed a significant number of posts in the blogosphere about the VP selection possibilities for John McCain so I wrote my booster piece for Meg Whitman. I took the link and embedded it in a couple of comment threads on other blogs.*
I got lots more hits, but no comments. I could tell as I was writing it that my normal commenters weren't going to be that interested in it, but I was wondering if it could catch a few additional links here and there and bring in many more hits. It might have garnered one or two links, but nothing substantial. The experiment wasn't a great success. The time spent praising Meg was time taken away from additional posts and she was the lead post for the whole day. Yawn.
I've tried this before and it's never worked. Eventually I'll learn.
* - Leaving links in the comments may or may not be proper blog commenting etiquette, but I felt that my post was sufficiently long and had enough original content to be worthy of a link in the comments.
I guess the question is, what do people have to *say* about a given post that makes them think "I must comment on this"? Over on my site, I get a few hundred unique visitors a day, but the majority of the posts still never get any comments. That's fine, they are mostly straight informational posts about insects that I generally expect that the readers don't really have strong opinions about, so why *should* they comment?
ReplyDeleteIn the case of your Meg Whitman post, my main reaction was "OK, fair point, she'd probably do for VP". This didn't seem worth a comment, though. I didn't come into reading the article with any strong opinions about McCain's running mate (other than the fact that, given his significant odds of dying of old age in office, it had better be a *good* one), so what was there to say?
Tim, thanks for the comment. When I wrote that post, I didn't expect my regulars to chime in, but I was wondering if any new visitors would. I think your analysis is spot on.
ReplyDeleteOne other thing about comments: when I was originally over on Livejournal posting standard types of bloggy stuff, the things that I thought were well-thought-out posts worthy of discussion generally got approximately no comments. On the other hand, my all-time record number of comments on a single post was an "Is this thing on?" test post when I was having trouble connecting. It got ten comments. Go figure.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, I'm inclined to think that "number of comments" is only weakly correlated with the value of the post.
You'll find you get the most comments when people vehemently disagree with you.
ReplyDeleteIt feels lame somehow to leave an "I agree entirely." comment, and sometimes it takes too much effort to explain why in a way that really contributes to the discussion.
We've been trained to be critics, not to extend praise. :)