Well that was interesting. I'd been wanting to write 100 comments on 100 different blogs for a while, but I needed a weekday to do it and I needed a weekday when I was actually at home and not at work, so tube strike day was perfect. The opportunity to 'work from home' is not one to be sniffed at, and it was of course possible to fit in a full day's work inbetween the commenting. Honest it was. And here's what I found out.
How to find 100 blogs worth commenting on • It's easy to begin with, you just work down your blogroll. • Then you work down the list of UK Updated Weblogs to see who's just updated (although it turns out that lots of sites at the top of the list haven't actually updated in days, or even weeks, or in some cases months. • Then you start looking at other people's blogrolls, which is where you start coming across blogs you've not read before, which is great. Except that some are really dull (mainly the US-political or techgeeky ones) in which case you can't find anything interesting to comment on at all. • Then you start looking at the blogrolls of people you found on other people's blogrolls, which is where it starts to get a bit desperate, but it turns out there are still some gems out there. • Finally you return to your original blogroll and check out the people who hadn't posted anything at noon but had by 9pm. Result.
Commenting on 100 blogs • A lot of people in blogworld yesterday were writing about the same thing. I left lots of comments about Mike's new hyphen, almost as many about the tube strike and quite a few about the brilliance of the Firefox browser. • I never left the same comment twice. • Ahh, don't some people write great stuff on their blogs?
Leaving comments on 100 blogs • There are two different ways to leave comments on blogs. You either get a pop-up box to write in or the comments are added to the blog page itself. • Pop-up boxes are better because they're much quicker and because you don't have to navigate off the main blog page. Moveable Type pop-up boxes are best of all because you can preview your post and avoid embarrassing spelling mistakes. • Comments posted on the same page as the post itself are worse because the whole process of clicking through to individual pages is sooo slow and because you end up on a single-post page, not the blog front page. Typepad and Blogger commenting is the slowest.
What happened after I'd commented on 100 blogs • People started noticing that I'd commented on their blogs, particularly on the 80-or-so blogs where I don't normally comment. And some of them tracked back to my blog to take a look, as did some of their readers. By midnight last night more than a quarter of the 100 blog owners had visited here and left a comment themselves. Ta. • Some people noticed that, as well as commenting on their blog, I'd also linked to them on my big 1-100 list. And a few of them linked back. Ta. • I got more comments yesterday than on any day ever, except for my birthday. But having a birthday is a lot less effort than writing 100 comments on other people's blogs. • I got more visitors to my blog yesterday than on any day in the last three months. About 100 more than usual in fact. It'll never last.
Conclusions • I must revisit those 100 blogs today to see if anyone's commented on my comments. • I can't promise to write 100 comments every day but I shall try to write a few more than the handful I usually do. • Maybe you could write a few more comments too, not necessarily here but somewhere else, somewhere unexpected. Go on, people really appreciate them. I know.
