Blogger's Secret

The comment is better than the story, so quote from the comment

Newspapers have grown to grudgingly embrace commentary, and have spent a lot of time trying to attract people to leave comments on their site. If you are unlucky, the commentary is awful; if you are lucky, one comment in two is worth reading, and perhaps one in twenty is better than the story itself.

The practice of blogging lends itself to well-sourced quotations from other sources. If the comment is better than the story, then lead with your well-linked clip of the comment itself. How much more fun it is to pull the good discussion out of the morass, even if the lede is barely noteworthy.

This inspired by Jordan Miller's plea for more sandwich stories (and fewer pet stories) in one of Ann Arbor's online publications. Since I make or eat perhaps a dozen sandwiches in a week, I'm all for this.

Before you turn on comments, turn on spam filtering on comments

The saddest sight of all on any weblog is a thoughtful, well written post, with a half dozen spam comments at the bottom of it.  It's sad, and it doesn't need to happen.

Every worthwhile blogging software has tools for filtering spam in comments.  Akismet is a very good tool if you're in the Wordpress world, and people like me who run Typepad have their Typepad Antispam service at their disposal.  If your blogging software does not have a way to automatically reject spam comments, then you're simply running the wrong software.

Even with automated filtering there are bound to be clever bots (or ill-paid individuals) who sneak commercial messages into comments.  As time has gone on these techniques mutate, to the point where at some gray area level you can't tell whether the comment is genuinely useful but commercial, or a real human being positive about a product. 

Your comment review process should look at every single comment that comes in and be prepared to unpublish or edit it if it does not reflect your editorial judgement of what you want to publish on your site.  You can only start to have an editorial process if some system flushes out all of the easy dumb spam.  Turn comment filtering for spam on before your first comment goes live.

Cherish your comments, even if you have to write them yourself

One happy result of writing a weblog is that you get comments from people on things that you write.  At first, it's only the people that you tell about specific posts a few times and mention them by name; next, it's a general community that you kind of know about but are sometimes surprised who shows up from a search engine; and finally, in some rare 1% part of the blog world, 100s of people will descend upon 1% of the things that 1% of the bloggers write and turn them into ongoing forums.

Cherish the comments you get, even if you have to write them yourself.  I generally look for a benchmark where the first 100 posts will get 100 comments, but you might need to write 40 or 50 of them yourself to get the ball rolling.  You'll comment on your own post because there is something more to say that didn't get said the first time around, and rather than rewriting the post you just tack something on to the end.  You'll also comment on your own work just to refresh year-old items where the calendar is crawling around to this year's Groundhog Day, this year's blueberry season, this year's Festifools puppet parade, or this year's annual convention, and you want to see what happened last year to get ready for your annual post.

Writing comments to yourself can sound like a dialogue, especially if you forgot what you originally wrote or disagree with yourself on later reflection.  And commenting on your own work prepares you to comment intelligently on the work of others.