I am torn on how I should handle comments on this blog. Should I disable comments all together? Should I only show the positive comments? Should I reply to comments? It is also difficult to tell which comments are authentic and which comments are from people who really don’t care about what you write, they just want their comments picked up by search engines or get a comment approved so that they can then spam you.
What is the point of blog comments? Are they just badges to hang on your site that say, “Look at how important I am, people are commenting on my blog”? To be honest, I think that is how I have been treating them up until now. After giving the subject some thought, blog comments in my opinion are for turning a one way dialogue (blog post) into a 2 way conversation; be that between blog author and commenter or between commenter’s themselves. With this in mind I am now going to make an effort to reply to every comment on our blog. After deleting the obvious spam comments I simply do not want to spend the time contemplating whether a comment is authentic or not, so I am just going to accept and comment on them all!
Let’s see how this experiment goes. And please don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate the time that anyone takes to comment on something that we write.
