Instead of Introduction

Comments. Every blogger I know loves comments. Some just enjoy them, others need them more than air. You can watch your Google Analytics graphs, monitor FeedBurner feed subscribers, or check your Technorati rating three times a day - comments are the only way you know for sure that humans read your blog, and that they care about what you have to say. Comments are also among the first thing people check to see if your blog is popular or not. If you have comments, you are probably saying something important.

There are, of course, several types of comments. You’d welcome some, and you’d hate the others. I’ll try to break them up into three categories, as the title suggests - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The Good

Good comments, the ones that you want to see more of, participate in discussion you started with your post - different points of view, more arguments, re-phrasing, links to related web pages that you haven’t found yourself, pointers to new sources of information that you haven’t considered, explanations, etc.

Sometimes you’d make a typing mistake, or paste a wrong link, or mix up a word. If you are lucky, a good comment will come in and suggest the correction.

The Bad

Bad comments are those that don’t add anything to your original post or the discussion that it started. These come in all shapes and forms from simple smiley faces, through “me too” comments, to irrelevant paragraphs that you don’t know if you should keep or delete.

Many bloggers love to get bad comments. Because those are about the only comments they get. Because bad comments, even though they are bad, still assure the blogger that someone read and maybe even understood the original post.

The Ugly

Ugly comments are those that even hungry-for-comments don’t want to receive. Ugly comments are from SPAM bots and trolls. They don’t add any value to your discussions. They don’t even reassure you that a human being read your post. And, on top of that, they have to be deleted from your blog, so that you feel safe about your kids and parents surfing through your blog.

Instead of Conclusion

So, how can we get rid of The Ugly comments, and increase the number of The Good comments over The Bad comments? There is only one way that I know of - manually. If you read someone’s blog, you probably care enough about what is said. (Otherwise, why are reading it anyway?) And if you care enough, than pause for a second and think if you can add anything to the discussion. Maybe you haven’t completely understood something. Or maybe you know of something that is very related to the article, but not mentioned in there. Or maybe you noticed a typo. Leave a comment.

Leaving a comment is not that difficult. Most blogs will ask you to fill in:

• your name (please, do so, they want to know who you are),
• your email (please, do so, they want to have a way to contact you back),
• you web site URL (please, do so, if you have one, because they want to know more about you)
• your comment (that’s what you wanted to do, didn’t you?)

In order to leave a good comment, add something to the discussion. Or provide a correction. Send a link. Share your experience… It will take you only a couple of minutes, but it will add so much good to the blogosphere. First, you’ll make the blogger happier. Nothing stimulates blogging more than comments. Not even money. Second, you’ll bring some attention to the topic that you care about (you are reading about it, aren’t you?). Third, you’ll increase the number of The Good comments over The Bad comments.

If you don’t know where to start, or not sure that you are doing it right, feel free to practice here. Use this post as your playground for The Good comments. Thank you.