Ever notice how most review sites ask you to sum up your review with a one-liner?
I wish blog comments worked that way – write a comment over 50 words and you have to write a very concise summary. Maybe I’ve become conditioned by the soundbite nature of Twitter, but it seems to me that most comments could be summarised in 10 words or less.
Brevity is the soul of wit
Reading blog posts takes time, often there’s some significant action in the comments too, and reading them can take much longer than the original post.
Some comments are just a ‘yes, I agree’, others have valuable information, often there’s no way to tell, and even skimming a three paragraph comment takes time.
If you’ve got so much to say why not write your own blog post?
There are a number of reasons for this but to sum up:
- Audience – your reason for writing a response is to have people read it. Crafting a whole blog post then submitting it as a trackback or even writing a taster of it and linking to your post in a comment will get far fewer visitors than the original post.
- Time – it’s quicker to write a comment than to go to your own blog, log in, write the post, proof-read it (hopefully) and select an image to illustrate it.
To sum up
What I’d like to see is blog comment interfaces add a place for you to put your summary – characters deliberately limited, so that the writer of a comment is guided in keeping the summary concise too. Whether the comments are displayed ‘summary only’ or whether the summary should be compulsory or not would be down to individual blogger.
A further option to encourage content spread would be to offer to auto-tweet the comment with a short url link to the blog post.
I’d love it if Disqus, the emerging new force in blog comments, would implement this.
Image credit: Bob AuBuchon
