I’ve been using Cocomment to track my comments since May 2006. I don’t always remember to track every comment but it’s the best way I’ve seen so far. So I went back and tallied the number of comments I wrote divided by the number of posts I’ve written.
99/140= .71
So the point is that I write more posts than I write comments. I don’t know what an optimum number would be but it seems to me that if blogging is really about reading, reflecting and writing, then I should be commenting at least as much as I post. I know some prefer simply to link to posts and comment on their own blogs but their is something generous about commenting right on the blog you’re reading. It’s not only generous but I think enables conversations to flow better. Especially for newer bloggers, it’s important to encouarge them as many may not even have trackbacks enabled or subscribe to technorati searches of themselves. Taking every conversation back to your own blog is a bit arrogant in my opinion. Sometimes it does make sense when you are planning to take a post in a different direction or want to expound further but you should still leave a comment.
Here are some champion commenters:
- Ewan McIntosh 633 comments since March 20
- D’Arcy Norman 441 comments since February 7
- Vicki Davis 236 comments since June 26
- Karl Fisch 229 comments since August 10
These are some number and habits we should be considering. By the way, you can subscribe to other people’s comments as well. So if you have the means, calculate your comments to post rating or as I call it “commpost” rating. I’d like to get close to 1.0[tags]commpost rating comments[/tags]