Analysis of blogging on the net: why do we comment?

Alex Nesbitt in, “Comments, comments, comments, what makes people comment?” makes an interesting analysis relevant for anyone publishing a blog. He analyzes the blog MizFit Online, which has about 100 comments per post; Nesbitt then lists six points that we can learn from this.

While I enjoyed this post, I tend to fair on the side of qualitative and philosophical analysis rather than on “data.” I think the amount of comments that MizFit receives reveals something about the amount of readers that the blog has in the first place. The percentage of readers who comment would be more relevant, but how would we learn that information about someone else's blog?

The point is, we bloggers want to engage the audience. So we simply want to know how we can get more readers, and how we can get more of them to comment.

Here’s why I think people comment: mutualism. Bloggers comment on other like-minded blogs in order to gain readership.

Do we want comments or traffic?

I think Mike Fruchter's post at Louis Gray’s blog “10 Pointers for Generating Traffic to Your Blog” is worth its weight in hypertext gold. If you read this post (and if you don’t your missing out), you will quite simply see what gets comments and why.

But there are no rules

One of the wonderful things about the new media is that there are no real do's and don't's. In fact, breaking supposed rules is what the new media desires, because it is the collective breaking of the mold (an ironic concept) that generates new media. Twitter does what blogging, text-messaging, and email simply aren't formatted to do.