More blogs start mining reader comments for gold
They give spam-wary search engines the jitters, readers often skip them and some sites even ban them, yet blog comments seem poised to enjoy a turn in the digital spotlight.
There’s a growing recognition that visitors generate lots of engaging content when they post reactions to blog entries – although guiding readers to the best of it remains a challenge.
The Huffington Post took a stab at addressing the issue last week by announcing plans to elevate one commenter a month to full-fledged blogger status. The selection process will factor in reader votes and moderator preferences to mine a potentially potent minor-league talent system that’s generated some 2.7 million comments in less than 28 months.
“It gives our community the opportunity to play an even more important role in our site, while also allowing us the chance to discover new bloggers who have already proven to be popular with our readers,” founder Arianna Huffington told Publishing 2.0.
HuffPo might boast the most complex selection method, but it isn’t the first site to elevate commenters to the blogging bigs. Reader submissions power the politically progressive Daily Kos, for instance. Closer to home, The Spokesman-Review’s moderate Huckleberries Online recently began enlisting trusted readers to serve as weekend discussion wranglers.
Huckleberries maestro Dave Oliveria regularly pulls insightful and provocative replies into front-page posts as well. Other blogs highlight comments of the day or week in items that spawn even more reactions. (The Comics Curmudgeon honored one comic-strip comment of the week and 15 runners-up in a recent entry that drew more than 80 additional comments.)
At some sites, lively comment conversations morph into the main attraction, recasting bloggers as cyber cocktail-party hosts.
Commenters add value in other ways as well. They can provide something called “crowdsourcing,” adding pertinent information to a post at the blogger’s request. When I completed a roundup of celebrities who blog last year, for instance, readers offered links to several I’d missed. Other bloggers employ the technique to dig newsworthy details out of hot government documents.
One fun crowdsourcing example emerged last month when a post on the New York Times Readers’ Comments blog asked visitors to recall favorite discontinued products. I wasted an hour scanning more than 1,400 replies citing defunct darlings ranging from Gibson “star” guitar picks and Stretch Armstrong action figures to phone booths and the Acura Integra.
But who has time to scroll through thousands of comments on a regular basis? Some blogs, such as those in the Gawker Media network, manage inflow quantity and quality by putting would-be commenters through an audition process – and 86’ing those who turn into bores with “no warning, and no appeal.”
Other sites pull the plug on comments entirely. Marketing guru Seth Godin banished them from Seth’s Blog last year. “Comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs,” Godin wrote as he turned off the spigot. “Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.”
Despite such exclusionary tactics, comments comprise up to 20 percent of overall blog content – and “the commentsphere” grows by about 150,000 reader responses a day, Nielsen BuzzMetrics estimated last year.
Such stats once prompted Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel to proclaim, “Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than any other form of consumer-generated content.”
The free coComment application now enables users to track online conversations, which helps make all that content a bit more manageable. But as Rubel pointed out, we also could use a robust comment search engine.
Not to mention an extra couple hours in the day to use it.