When I started blogging 5 years ago, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I thought I was just publishing words on the internet. But it turned out to be much more than that.
The first blogs were one-way affairs where the webmaster wrote something and others read it. Sometimes they wrote a little and sometimes they wrote a lot, but it was always just bunged up on screen for others to digest. If you had a blog about, for example, your experiences aboard public transport, then you'd not really have much of a clue about what people thought of it. Neither would your readers get the chance to add their voice to your thoughts. No way to say "ooh, I hate it when the driver says that to me too" or even "those teenagers need to be strung up by their headphones from the top deck". Blogs needed more than just content. There was something missing.
The ability to comment has made a huge difference to blogging. Blogging need not be one-way traffic, it can be a two-way conversation. It's content plus comment.
Every post I publish is, in some way, an experiment in feedback. Will my walk through Bexley get any comments at all? If I ask my readers about Facebook, will they ever shut up? And if I accidentally make a factual error, who will be the first to chip in and point it out? I love the fact that my readers might, or might not, make comments on what I write. Often the comments are the best bit of the blog, adding depth and additional facts that I never knew, and that you probably didn't either.
Of course, just because a blog invites comment doesn't necessarily mean that anybody will. As we discovered in the infamous doughnut experiment two years ago, lack of comments doesn't necessarily equate with lack of interest. Commenting requires effort on behalf of the reader, and readers aren't always known for their effort. Commenting may require reloading the page ("can't be bothered"). It may require typing in some nigh illegible validation script ("can't be bothered"). It may require switching from the RSS feed to the main webpage ("can't be bothered"). It may require registering ("really can't be bothered"). And it always relies on someone being motivated enough to think of something worth commenting about in the first place. Only a tiny proportion of a blog's readership ever get round to commenting, which can be a bit of a problem when readership is low. There's little more dispiriting on a brand new blog than month after month of posts reading 0 comments - because it's the comments that will (one day) tell you what people really think.
I've been lucky - I've managed to build up a veritable army of regular and semi-regular commenters over the years (and only a very few of them have been nutters spouting irrelevant drivel). My commenting community has evolved as readers have arrived, lingered and moved on, and it's very different now to the group it was three or four years ago. But this blog wouldn't be half as interesting without you, so thanks. Because every comment counts.
(And yes, I know, I really ought to comment on your blog more often. We all should.)
