Encouraging your readers to comment, or not.
I’ve never been much of a person to attempt to develop community. In fact if you look at my posts this week I think most people didnt want to comment on my posts possibly because I write in a tone that discourages comments. Maybe I don’t ask enough questions. Maybe because people ping me via AIM and Twitter and give me feedback. You know what I decided on a few of my sites. To just hang it up. To flat out remove the ability to comment. And on others I installed a WordPress plugin to encourage regular readers to comment more.
It’s called the Comment Prompt
This is a very simple plugin for wordpress 2.0+
The idea is to encourage lurkers and long term visitors to take the plunge and comment on your blog. Often people just need a little encouragement so this plugin will nag I mean encourage the user by posting a message to encourage them to post. Once they have posted their first comment it stops.
Either way blogs can be a platform for community or a platform for publishing or some sort of hybrid in between.
There are 2 reasons I don’t comment on a blog post, any blog post.
1. I’m reguired to register or jump through too many hoops to post.
2. My response would be something like, “Yes I do agree, thank you!” and that’s spam catching type comments.
Thanks Bob. I was hoping someone noticed the humor in this whole thing.