Thing #12: Creating Community Through Commenting

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs according to the article about blogging from Wikipedia. A blog is a vehicle for a group of people with common interests to communicate, share, and learn in spite of barriers of time and distance.

Read How to Comment Like a King (or Queen!) from Cool Cat's blog.

Read 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog

Read The Ten Commandments of Blog Commenting

Blue Skunk has some comments about commenting. Incidentally, he pretty much responds to every commentor of each of his posts! In another post he asks "Are you contributing to the general discussion?" He feels commenting is "a unique characteristic of blogging - that it can be more dialog than sermon.

"Meredith Farkas of Information Wants to Be Free has an interesting response to the idea of sharing information through commenting...even if you do not feel you have worthy thoughts!

Drape's Takes has something to say about commenting as a part of his Edublogger Etiquette series.

Here is a short post about commenting using an alias vs. your real name from Blogging 101. You can read many other posts about commenting. There is a podcast about lurking and commenting. Listen if you wish. It is useful information but is rather lengthy.

Discovery Activities:

1. Think about the various points made about successful comments from the above readings. In the post about this Thing, explain two of the points that you think are important.

2. Since commenting has been described as essential to the purpose of blogging that includes community building and interaction, choose at least five different Library2Play blogs and make at least one comment to each.

3. Find two blogs about a subject of personal interest (Google Blog Search!) or from the blogroll of any blogger you read. Comment on these two blogs that are not a part of the Library2Play community. In your post about this Thing, explain what drew your attention to these blogs.

It is understood that you may want to do some of this commenting at different times during this 23 Things experience.Create the post as usual and as you find new things to comment about, come back to the post, use the edit feature, and add your new thoughts.
OR
Do your blog post about this activity later. As long as you label the post with "Thing 12," it does not have to appear in numerical order.