Blog comments are dead: discuss

Au contraire. Comments on blogs are alive and well. The fact they don’t all co-habit with the blog is immaterial.

I would normally comment on FF, failing that Disqus and finally, reluctantly, I have to waste a couple of clicks and valuable seconds to comment on the actual blog.

FriendFeed is a closed system, with real limits to participation, longevity, and control. I seriously doubt that in its current form it poses a threat. Blog comments aren’t going away.

Some factors contributing to your perspective: on FriendFeed (small pond), you’re a celebrity. In the blogosphere (huge pond), you’re not quite as famous. Plus, you never post here anymore.

The other problem is the value of all the comments of friendfeed are good for people on friendfeed, but for everyone else they don’t exist. People hitting your posts off Google, off links from other blogs, visiting from their feed readers etc., get no value from all these comments on friendfeed.

It’s not a naked conversation any more, it’s a circle jerk with people who know you and are fans of yours and want to follow everything you do. For everyone else there is no conversation. Sure it’s easier for you, but is the point of comments just for you? Why even bother having publically displayed comments if you don’t care about your readers being able to see them.

The solution is, of course, to integrate friendfeed comments into the relevant blog post. It’s the only way you’ll get the value from dedicated fans and casual readers.

Really now? The Shel vs. Loren latest post grabbed 85 comments in no time. All depends on the pitch.

Blog comments aren’t dead, nor are IMs, forums, social sites, online games, heck, mindless internet activity is at an all time high, seemingly.

But your blog hasn’t been a blog in years, more a calendar posting of places, faces and videos done, with the occasional ill-informed hype smatterings. You were at your best in the NEC days; the Microsoft, Podtech, FastCompany era, but a shrill placeholder.

I don’t know that comments on blogs are dead – and that Friendfeed or Discuss wins at this point. I think we are all still sorting out what works best for posting vs. commenting – and they might end up on the same platform and they might not. I like Friendfeed for discussing in a way that feels like “forums 2.0″, especially with the rooms feature. Where both posting or original content (to friendfeed) and commenting all happen together – as a larger conversation around a certain topic.

Friendfeed’s interface is still very obnoxious to a majority of people – with very little mass appeal – which means it certainly can’t kill commenting on blogs for most people. But if it can up the simplicity with losing the information – then things will get interesting.

I think most people just became too tired of visiting many blogs and posting comments there. But I do believe that people are still active participants in most blogs. They just prefer to read and leave off.

Too many people focus on commenting and less on creating web content. Many search engines will be weighing this.

Comments are also web content, not everybody can be authors of a given arthicle.

All due respect, man, it’s time to step out of the “Scoble Bubble” and say hello to the rest of the world. So you use friendfeed, fantastic. For ALL of my clients still struggling to understand the point of Twitter, to all of my relatives that can’t remember to check my flickr stream, and to my friends in the industry who only sometimes visit my blog because they’re busy working, blog comments aren’t dead as much as not quite understood. We may agree that blog comments aren’t getting the traffic they should but that’s because you’ve moved past them while the rest of the world has mostly yet to find them.

I’m curious though – if blog comments are so dead (whatever that statement means), why are we seeing an uptick in Disqus/Intense Debate adoption?

41 comments.. looks like they’re alive and kicking, Robert.

Isn’t comments on a blog post synonymous with the blog traffic? Who cares about your post if your blog has little to know traffic.

Friendfeed is a herd utility. Let be there cause everyone else is.

Isn’t comments on a blog post synonymous with the blog traffic? Who cares about your post if your blog has little to no traffic.

In the early days, a blog attracted comments severely based on it’s content weight. Now, it is all about track back, link backs and residual traffic.

Friendfeed is a herd utility. Let’s be there cause everyone else is.

i think what has killed it is the nofollow tags… people only thought about how to increase their rankings on google and commenting on other peoples blog was one way to do it and ignored the potential traffic flow for the forseeable future atleast… but that also presents opportunitiues as less ppl are commenting… the likelihood of your link being shown is greater

if you are going to comment.. you want to find blogs that are ranked high in google, technorati or have high ratings on social bookmark sites.. thats how i find blogs to comment on

I agree. I run a blog at http://www.angryguildleader.com about the game we play, and almost everything I get is spam

Tauntress
http://www.dvdwizards.net

I had a musician friend who kept a daily blogging. Usually would get about 2-3 comments a year. So… clearly a blogger can go without comments… but maybe that’s just narcissism.

- Imar
http://www.musicianforest.com

Yeah, but over on FriendFeed I like commenting a lot more than I like commenting on individual blogs. Note that over on FriendFeed, in just a few minutes, this post already has gotten tons more comments than here on WordPress (and the WordPress item was up longer).
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Disable comments on your blog, then. Put up or shut up

Would Robert Scoble stop sharing his incites and thoughts if the comments came to a halt and all social interaction