Krillz.com

Blogs, blogers, blog readers that’s a sphere I and you reading this blog are a part of. Not only is the relationship between the writer and reader important but you can’t forget about the relationship between the readers as well. If you are a blog owner you most of the time want to have the readers interact with each other in addition to their opinion on what you just wrote.
The problem with most blogers is the problem of getting the comments rolling, you might think that there’s only one solution ant that is to get people to your blog. Indeed that’s necessary for any site on the net, but as I noticed and I guess other people do as well, is that although you have the visitors, a very little amount of them will leave a comment. So there have been many different methods to getting people to post. One blog owner would donate $10 to charity for every comment he got on a specific post. Now most of us do not have the money to do such a thing so instead many have a top commentators plugin to try to spark some activity, hoping that a link back to the most active readers’ sites would get things rolling. But if you think about it, this will only work on blogs that actually have a good stream of visitors as otherwise this becomes unprofitable.
Now back to what I was originally thinking of before my thoughts flew away in a completely different direction and that was whether the plugin for the blog is a wise move or not.

Let me present the positive aspects of it first, as most of us like to hear the good news first.

For the blog owner this is a good tool to show some love to their readers and commentators as the most active in the “community”, followers is perhaps a better word. They will get a link back or be announced to the rest. The more active your blog becomes, people realize that more people are actually around and some (not all of course!) will want a piece of that link love as well thus this will spawn a lot more activity and comments. That’s great who wouldn’t want a lot of comments and activity?

But then we have the negative side with using this. You get a lot more comments but are those comments of any value? Or are they simply replies to get on that list?
I’ve seen blogs that have around 50+ comments on each and every post, but if you take a look at them then you’ll realize that they have no value at all, no feedback (a part from the praise) what so ever, no discussion going on about the topic and the things that were presented in the post.

It resembles almost spam in a way, and you can see that the reason why the comment was made was simply to get a plus one added to their comment score. Sadly this is going on out there in the blogosphere, especially on the bigger blogs with a lot of traffic.

So is it wise to use this plugin, I don’t really know. It depends on what you aiming at achieving. I don’t see it as a bad or a good thing, as with most things it has a good and a bad aspect and this was just something I have been thinking about for two days now and I finally decided to write about it.

Of course there are exceptions, there are blogs without the plugin that has the “spam” effect going on in their comments and there are blogs with the plugin with very little commenting going on although they have good amount of traffic to their blog.

In the end it’s up to each and every blog owner to revise the pros and cons and decide whether or not to use it. Good comments versus many but not necessarily valuable comments, but the decision isn’t that easy to take after all when you think about it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Linux, Review, projects. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.