Blog Comments

A year and a half ago, i wrote a long post explaining why nofollow would not work, so it’s no great surprise to be proved right. This hasn’t just happened, it’s not suddenly stopped working: It never worked, and has only had the predicted detrimental effect on the web and the way we link.

Jeremy, a top bod in Yahoo! Search, who also supported this ludicrous idea, points to this post that lays the blame solidly at Google’s door. Im pretty sure I said so at the time, but if not, let me repeat my thoughts here: NoFollow was a “this will shut them up”, ill thought out, knee-jerk bandaid hurredly implemented to get bloggers and blog vendors off of Google/Yahoo’s back.

It could never work. As dylan points out, the economics of blog spam are that it is CHEAP to spam comments, and spammers don’t care if some of their efforts are in vain because it costs virtually nothing.

Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, WordPress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done … nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low.

Spot on.

Jeremy actually has the best advice I’ve seen regarding linking, particularly in the context of nofollow from a Search rep:

Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.

Really, that’s a breath of fresh air.

Google, and Yahoo, Knew this Wouldn’t Work

Remember I called this a bandaid? More precisely it was a PR bandaid, hastily slapped on during a crisis when no real answers were forthcoming (not ones that would be popular anyway). I find it impossible to believe that Search reps like Google’s Matt Cutts, NoFollows most ardent supporter, and Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny really believed this would work.

When Search pundits like Danny Sullivan point out that it’s a non solution, aswell as a host of other Search bloggers (some of whom are linked from this thread), why is it that GOOG/YHOO were the only ones who couldn’t see it?

Note that the people saying this wouldn’t work are as enthusiastic, and as knowlegable about Search as most Search reps.

The only people that believed this was a solution other than the engines, (who as i’ve said, were only paying lip service) were a bunch of folks who didn’t understand Search or the economics of blog spam.

Can we have some real debate on solutions now? Is it time yet? Or do we need to hear a few more fairy tales first?

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Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users
is one of my favorite reads and was a big part of what inspired me to
start the TypePad Hacks project. Which is ironic, in a way, because
although I agree with Kathy on a lot of things, our take on feature
requests is totally opposed. Her recent post Don’t give in to feature demands! starts out:

The more successful the product or service is, the stronger the
pressure to give in to user requests. The more users you have, the more
diverse the requests. One user’s must-have-or-else feature is another
user’s deal-killer. And the more popular your product or service is,
the more those requests start turning into demands and ultimatums, and
finally very harsh criticisms.

The worst thing we can do is give in. But as the requests/demands
and criticisms become louder and angrier, the harder it is to resist
the siren call— "But if we just added this one thing… these guys would
ease up."

But when we’ve blended all the colors into one muddy blob, then
nobody hates us, and nobody is delighted, excited, or turned on by what
we do. We become mediocre. Usually the worst place to be.

She goes on to list 13 categories of "people who might
make feature requests or demands," and suggest how and when companies
should respond to them. It’s an interesting read. I recommend it for
regular readers here who have participated in the discussion of adding
features to TypePad.

Now, I get where Kathy is coming from when she says that trying
to do too many things can lead to mediocrity (or worse, even). At the
same time, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the bulk of features fall
into a must-have/deal-killer dynamic. There’s hardly an app on my
laptop where I use all the features, but generally it doesn’t bother me that they do more

than I need them to. So long as the application remains stable,
reasonably fast, and the options are well-organized, I’m perfectly
willing to ignore what I don’t need. The place where I see a risk of
alienating one user to please another is not so much in adding features
as in changing them. Everyone gets frustrated when a new version
launches and they can’t find or use the features that had become second
nature. But new stuff? I don’t see an issue…

I suggest reading Kathy’s post for an alternate view on the issue.

How many of you have purposefully arrived a little late to a party to avoid the awkwardness of being the only one there, apart from the host(s)? How many online forums have you arrived at from search engines where the only topics are those by the forum owner, so you’ve refrained from posting a response? Probably a few. Now, how many of you might have got involved with some of those forums if there had been evidence of a bigger community? Again, I’m going to assume quite a few of you.

The same mentality applies to new blogs. We all tend to want to be heard by as many others as possible, so why would we comment on a blog with no other participants?

This leaves the owner of a new blog with a conundrum. How do you get people to comment on your site if they won’t do so until someone else does?

There are a few options you can try, although none are exactly perfect.

1. Comment yourself. This is the easiest option, but unless you’re adding something significant extra to your original entry you’ll look like you’re talking to yourself.
2. Pretend to be someone else. Pretty much the same as option one, but a little further along on the ‘sad-o-meter’.
3. Invite people to comment. Whether it’s inviting other bloggers in your niche, or just getting your mates to comment, sending an email invitation out can be one of the most effective ways to get a conversation going. A note on your friends – make sure they’re going to have something to add to the conversation. If something looks like a clique others will be put off.
4. Write Better Content. If you’re still not pulling anyone in, could it be your content just isn’t good enough to provoke discussion? Take a look back over everything you’ve written. Look for places it could be improved, and bear your findings in mind when you write your next entry. This will take the most time to achieve results, but is far and away the best for long-term results.
5. Provoke Controversy. Good old controversy. A time-honoured way to get people talking. Just remember to prepare for negative responses to whatever you write. Also referred to as “link-baiting”, controversial posts carry a risk of ruining any good reputation you might hope to achieve. My preference would be to avoid using controversy unless absolutely needed.

This list is far from exhaustive and are mostly just off the top of my head. What methods have you used for kicking off the conversations on your new blogs?

Has anyone got a theory for why so many visitors to blogs feel the urge to tell you all the ways in which you are wrong, dumb, suck etc, but don’t feel enough conviction to have their name associated with their opinions?

It seems strange to me that someone would want to give another the benefit of their wisdom but not take credit for it. If I was the creator of such enlightened and pithy commentary as “you suck, leave the ‘sphere asswad” I am sure I would not only want full credit but to have it registered in case of plagiarism.

Of course not all comments are as intelligently crafted as that example. Some even are posted in quite agreeable language with only a minimum of cussing. Even so many people do not want to use their own names. It’s almost like they want you to know how they feel but do not really care for your reply.

I can understand someone posting anonymously if there is a chance their comments could get them into some sort of trouble, but otherwise …

Do you ever post anonymously and if so, why?

In the thread The Real Blogosphere Kim Krause Berg is interested in

finding someone who can make archives more usable. They are a blog nightmare, I think, for long-time blogs with years of archives. All those pages of posts could be little gems of history, links, and information, with ads and text ads on them to bring in revenue. Blogger sorely lacks ways to deal with sorting blog posts for example. Some software offers categories, which is a big help. Most blogs are immediate resources which could be changed if there was a way to drill into them deeper.

Kim is asking for a solution for existing pages/archives but the whole sub-thread got me thinking about optimizing the intuitive navigation for new visitors. Every first time reader always has to face the problem to handle a new site design and some kind of the blog owners personal content strategy. BTW I responded pretty arrogant that “this (problem) sounds exactly like somebody made the wrong decision for the wrong system architecture” – which I believe is true but not a real answer. So how can we get a flexible solution which suites many platforms and has good usage values for the king – our readers?

I think for big pages tag clouds are a very intuitive tool to understand and to use in these cases. Their look & feel is kind of ‘universal’ and the information compression rate is impressive. I did not implement tag clouds on my pages yet but right now I start to think that this is a good idea. What do you think? How are your experiences with good navigation on huge blogs?

Just today I got a recommendation for zoomclouds.com from a famous German blogger. He has a site with many articles and is pretty proud of his tag clouds. He only uses it in the article view and he said that he restricts single clouds to his individual WordPress category feeds which caught my curiosity. What you could do with that is to integrate different clouds on your archive page or on a specific ‘tag cloud page’. Textpattern i.e. offers the template tag txp:feed_link which can be used in templates to create different feeds. Of course you can also use external RSS feeds with zoomclouds to offer more content on your page.

I only checked zoomclouds.com very roughly but it looks promising. Basically they read RSS feeds and you can restrict the time window from ‘actual feed’ over ’24 hours’ in some steps up to ‘forever’. They offer an API, design customization, design templates, tag filters, tag click statistics and you can create more than one tag cloud. One disadvantage though is that every click on a tag first leads to the zoomclouds page so you risk to loose visitors but that’s the rule of the game. For Textpattern I could have a general tag cloud on the front or archive page and I could also easily customize the individual TXP section template pages to have different tag clouds for every section of the site. I believe tag clouds could be a good additional feature maybe combined with a ‘related posts’ block.

Are you using tag clouds? What is your experience? What are the best tag cloud services on the Internet? I am really interested to hear more about that subject!

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There’s a ton of advice out there for dealing with comment spam, but when it comes right down to it, the best advice is pretty simple. Darren has an outstanding post on spam this morning that talks about the cost of ignoring trash on your blogs. In it, he says this:

My main piece of advice for bloggers is to use up to date blogging software and to use the built in spamming solutions that many of them have built in or available with plugins.

And there you have it, it’s not foolproof, far from it, but it IS good advice. So, if for no other reason at all, make sure your software is up to date, and that you subscribe to whatever update mechanisms your software/plugins have for keeping you current.

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Steve Pavlina’s blog is the first one I’ve ever encountered that only allows trackback links. Steve has said that because of the volume of monthly traffic that he enjoys, it’s quite a task to manage the comments that he would typically get for his incredibly popular and valuable personal development site. He also indicated that it’s rather draining to moderate large volumes of comments. Instead, he has turned off comments and turned on trackbacks.

Trackbacks are mystery to many bloggers, but their value will grow on you. In fact, it took me about 3 weeks since reading about Steve’s use of them to truly understand their full value. Now this is only my own interpretation, but here’s a brief explanation and a list of positive reasons for using trackbacks on your blog:

1. Say that you write a blog entry that references one of my entries. If I have trackbacks turned on, an excerpt of your post will appear in my entry as a trackback comment. The text that appears typically starts and ends with an ellipsis (…). The actual excerpt text both surrounds and includes the anchor text with which you linked to my entry. The exact specifics of trackbacks vary from one blog platform to another, but with WordPress at least, I’ve found them to be on automatically.
2. While getting comments is an important aspect of building a successful blog, there is also the problem of getting unwanted comment spam. On one weblog that I called a hiatus on recently, I started getting 4-8 spam comments daily for several days. Now while I already had moderation turned on for comments, it was still a nuisance I had to deal with. I may yet have to deal with it more strongly in the future by blocking a list of IP addresses, if necessary. Steve Pavlina didn’t spell out his specific reasons, but he did say that comment moderation was a draining activity.
3. Trackback comments, on the other hand, are generated when someone writes their own blog entry that references your site. Since spambloggers don’t generally write content, you will not have  spambacks. (At least not that I’ve seen so far; fingers crossed.)
4. Enabling trackback comments encourages people to write posts that reference you, more so than if you only allow regular, manually-submitted comments. This arguably adds a bit more weight and credibility to the trackback comment, and thus might encourage other readers to visit the linking site.

Now here’s where I think that Steve Pavlina is even more of a genius than he already is, whether by design or not. By allowing only trackback comments, he’s either intentionally or unintentionally guaranteed that if you really want to comment on something he’s written, you’ll write your own post linking to him. Not only does he get you to write something possibly more lasting than a comment, but he also gets you to link to him.

Let that sink in for a moment. Some sites do not allow your comment to link back to your site. Some do. So comments are one-directional at best. Trackback comments, on the other hand, produce bi-directionality: links in both directions. The value of this is that many search engines and blog directories (such as Technorati) give your site more visibility as you gain an increasing number of links. I’m not talking about PageRank; if Nick says that links don’t matter, he needs a cyberspanking 🙂

That said, what Steve’s site does not have is an interactive discussion between readers. So while the linking is bidirectional, the conversation is not. Thus, disabling commenting in favour of just trackbacks might not be something you want for your own blog. However, if your blog does not have trackbacks enabled at all, I highly encourage you to turn them on to supplement commenting. Unfortunately, some blog platforms just do not support them. This includes Blogger.com and some platforms that do not fully support XMLRPC functionality.

Technorati Tags: blog comments, trackbacks, site promotion

I finally broke down (thanks to my partner Jimbo’s pressuring), and took a bit of time to sort out my company’s to-do list. (“Small business productivity”) While I’ll miss seeing the snazzy Notepad interface smiling up at me, the gains of using Ta-da list are already impressing me.

The thing about me is, I’ve never ever had a “great idea”. All I ever have is little 2 minute ‘slight improvement’ ideas. You know, those quick chores you think of when you’re surfing (and hopefully get around to later). These are the details that make a decent Web site good, and over time make a good Web site great. And they also make a mildly profitable business much more profitable (if you commit to doing them over a long period of time).

The problem being, during the course of a day I think of a dozen of these things that need to be done, and I either:

a) email it to myself or Jimbo to be done (and half the time we never get around to it because there’s no follow through), or
b) just plain forget about it.

Recently Jimbo made the jump to fulltime blog overlord, and he has a lot more hours in the day to actually do all the things we want to do. So rather than continuing to half-a** it, we finally got (semi) serious, and setup an account at Ta-Da list. (Neat little app by the way, but I’m not ready to name 37Signals the ‘next big thing’ quite yet).

Our productivity gains have been staggering. I finally have a clear overview of what work’s being done by whom, how long it takes, and where our strengths and weaknesses are. Which, if I’m getting real about building a business, is a necessity.

There. I did it. I made a post about productivity. See that transparent haze floating away? That’s my soul 😉