Day 21: Give a comment a promotion

Everybody loves a comment on their blog. It let’s you know that your post made someone think. That somebody agreed with you or disagreed with you enough to do some typing. It validates your work and continues the conversation, often generating new ideas and questions for yourself.

Bill Ferriter had some solid remarks about commenting from Day 8’s challenge:

…All too often, people think blogging = writing.

Blogging REALLY = writing + listening + responding + reading + arguing + listening some more + rethinking + revisiting

When bloggers get stuck in the “blogging is about the posts that I write” mindset, all we’ve got in the blogosphere is a heaping cheeseload of digital soapboxes, don’t we?

The commenting side of blogging has been great fun because it forces me to consider my own positions related to the author’s initial posts. Sometimes I agree, other times I disagree—but articulating that response ALWAYS improves my own understanding.

He’s dead on. And for that reason, it’s incredibly important to respond to your comments. While you can respond publicly on your blog, or privately via email, I believe the best solution is to do both. I’ve been pretty awful about this during the challenge, mostly due to time constraints, but typically I respond to comments directly via email, but then copy and paste that into a comment on the blog as well so it is embedded into the conversation for future visitors. It demonstrates that you respect your reader’s opinions enough to consider them a part of the conversation.

For today’s challenge, we’re going back to commenting with a slightly different spin. Your challenge for today is to integrate a comment into a new blog post of yours. This can be a comment that somebody left for you on your own blog (like I’ve done in this post), or a comment that somebody left on somebody else’s blog. This may require a little digging, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Honestly, there are times where the comments left on a blog post are perhaps more significant than the blog post itself.

Take a little time to find a comment that you think is worth promoting into a blog post, or integrating into one. Don’t forget to link directly to the comment itself on the blog post it came from and whenever possible, throw a link to the commentor’s blog as well.

And then leave a comment here explaining why you chose the comment that you did and where we can find your post! Oh, and if you haven’t listed yourself on the 30D2BBB wiki yet, be sure to do so.

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

5 Comments

Martha Thornburgh
11/22/2008

I appreciate your comments to me on my comments to you…:) Tonight I wrote a blog post on sharing and referenced Jason Levy’s comment in Will Richardson’s blog about the Power of Sharing. Great ideas about Power 2.0.

Martha Thornburgh´s most recent blog post.. Power 2.0: The Power of Sharing

Bill Ferriter
11/22/2008

Steve wrote:
Honestly, there are times where the comments left on a blog post are perhaps more significant than the blog post itself.

And you know what, Steve—I’d go as far as to argue that if you’re doing blogging “right,” this will grow to be the case every time!

The blog entries that I like the best are those where my readers shape understanding with each other because they are evidence that learning is taking place—-and that learning always crafts my own thinking too.

Cassie Erkens—a great Solution Tree presenter—always says, “The one who’s doing the talking is the one who is doing the learning.”

Translating that to the blog world, if writers really see blogging as a community of learners, they have a responsibility to promote/encourage/ moderate/support/ celebrate commenting on their blog.

Otherwise, the only person doing any learning is the writer of the original post.

That changes the dynamic between writers and readers, doesn’t it? If writers want followers, but followers don’t get the sense that writers value their input enough to engage in conversation or to find value in their comments, they’ll stop coming back.

Humans want to interact—-and on a blog, that means engaging your commenters in the conversation and giving them some ownership over the direction of the conversation.

Interesting stuff, indeed.
Bill

Will Richardson
11/22/2008

Hey Steve…thanks for choosing that post as an example. But remember…no post, no comments. ;0)

Will Richardson´s most recent blog post.. New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators

Michelle Bourgeois
11/24/2008

There are so many great examples of blog comments that should be a full fledged post. Matthew Needleman recently posted “Five Reasons Why We Aren’t Integrating Technology in School” at http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/?p=402 I replied, but then also used his comments to compare tech use to textbook use on my blog. It’s this cross-communication that makes blogging such a rich tool for learning.

Michelle Bourgeois´s most recent blog post.. Textbooks are Hard