TinkerX

Creative flux for our heap of broken images.

Comment imbalance

May 18th, 2008 | Category: Feh

I had an interesting epiphany a day or two ago, based on a couple notions:

  1. I blog more when I get comments. Which makes perfect sense, and the writing might either be in reference to a comment, or just make me feel good that somebody is reading my stuff.
  2. Content aggregators like BoingBoing.net (which I love, btw), live by directing attention to the postings of others’ blogs/sites.
  3. Almost every BoingBoing post I’ve read has waaaaay more comments on it about a piece than there are on the originating site

Epiphany: content aggregators should encourage people to post some of their comments on the originating sites.

I mean… take this post from BoingBoing on a creepy slacks ad from 1970. It has (at this moment) 58 comments.  The original post has four. That seems, to me, to be about the norm; 10/15X the comments at BB as at the originating post. In some cases, you’ll have a post where the BB readers start a full-on discussion, and the original post has no comments.

It’s entirely fair for BoingBoing to bring content together from an incredible array of sources, and to serve it up to a whole horde of us Websters. It’s not just fair, it’s helpful and cool and fun.  And BoingBoing makes money off’n their ads. Again; cool. And getting a post BoingBoinged is huge a traffic boost for the originator. Sometimes so much so that small blogs end up crashing from the number of hits. A friend of mine once called that BBDOS — BoingBoing Denial of Service.

But if readers want to respond to a post, shouldn’t they do it on the original writer’s blog/site? At least some of the time? 54 comments is more than I generally get in a year. I’d love to have that many readers having a discussion over something I wrote. And I guess I’d be glad to see that discussion happen at BoingBoing… but it would be cooler, still, if they’d come on ta my house and yap around the table that served the bloggy goodness.

Not a big deal. It just happened inside my head and I wanted to share the thought.

4 Comments so far

  1. bg May 19th, 2008 2:50 pm

    When you dig deeper though and read the comments, I don’t think you want that party on your blog. Some of it gets way out of hand. Next thing you know, the fridge is cleaned out and the house is trashed.

    ;-p

    And a USA Today link is even crazier as traffic spikes go.

  2. JB May 20th, 2008 1:41 pm

    Hey, Andy, [brilliantly insightful comment with impressive references to obscure academic and pop culture].

    Keep up the good work

    [signature block with link to reeeeeeally kewl website]

  3. Douglas Galbi May 21st, 2008 7:03 pm

    I’d guess that a lot of the commenters on BB haven’t actually read the linked post. That’s a variant interpretation of the “Slashdot Effect”.

  4. Andy May 24th, 2008 8:59 am

    bg: I may not want the whole party… but a little dancing on the patio would be nice ;-)

    JB: Kewl? Did you really want “kewl” on the Web, where data will live forever, next to your handle?

    Douglas: Yup. It just interests me that we have everybody talking about how the web is making us more social, and more connected and empowering individual contributors… but then you get an aggregator like BoingBoing or Slashdot and people still flock to the media hub rather than going to the creator.

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