A VC - Latest Comments in 100 Comments or Bust

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Antman — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:13:26 -0000

ABSOLUTLEY FRED!!!!!! With out a doubt comments are the greatest measure of a posts value. At cre8Buzz we heavily weight comments when creating buzzrank.

Comments are consideration for good content.. The more valuable the content, the more comments it earns. Good content compells people to express themselves. Creating content that does this is not easy.

It's not about whether a post is good or a post is bad, but rather a measure of how much a post impacts people enought to express themselves. In a world where people have little time to do anything, getting them to stop and leave a comment clearly is an impressive feat.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:37:07 -0000

I agree. Having a lot of comments is a moderately useful proxy for how interesting the post is, and how many people are going to be interested in following a link to it. Perhaps you can persuade technorati to list the number of comments, if there's a technical way for them to determine it efficiently.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Andy Lee Graham — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:58:38 -0000

I have a large Travel Blog, I believe the opposite is true, the best blog post are when you get zero comments and you feel you explained a great observation that nobody has observed or even considered. When I get a lot of comments is when I write about a topic that is trendy and really ot new information. I suppose I could write about Social Networks like Twitter, Facebook or these common themes you seem to repeat and I would get tons of comments. I skip these topics and see them as just fad, trendy, and irrelevant, I have not desire to be the King of a Social Network, seems to be the same as being the star in a Soap Opera.

Many comments just means everyone can relate, understand and knows a lot about the post, this is not cutting edge thinking, it is not novel and is not new observations, just a lot of people who can agree...

Andy of HoboTraveler.com in Thailand in transit to Africa

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

fredwilson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:04:03 -0000

No, a new design and new url still hosted here at typepad

That assumes all my plans work out

Fred

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

jackson — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:25:23 -0000

Comments as a meter only serves as a measure of your post's commentability. Cerainly if you're after discourse, as I know you are, then the number of comments is a good gauge of success. Sometimes I read great posts that don't leave the reader with much to say besides "great post". I wish that everybody who reads my blog would comment, but so few do. As you know, at times I'll toss up a contentious post just to get some action.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

RacerRick — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:54:46 -0000

The number of blog comments is a really good measure of the quality of a post. (I get none - what does this say about me?)

However, you can put up a crappy political-related post and get 3x the normal number of comments.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Martin Owen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:04:32 -0000

There are a whole bunch of ideas developed over the past 10 years from the sociable media group at MIT Media lab on visualized representation of intensity of discussion in sociable media. I recall chat circles is something that represents by intesity and size the most intense conversations in a chat room site. it is comparable to walking into a party or reception and making decision about which group to join, Sometimes the biggest and brightest is the one to join - but your voice may be small in that company. Smaller conversations might be of less general interest but may be both more salient for you and your voice would proportionately have more weight.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

RacerRick — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:39:32 -0000

the new blog - on Tumblr?

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

ceonyc — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:24:32 -0000

Funny! Great minds think alike! I was just thinking that Disqus should definitely great a disqus.com/popular page full of the most commented on posts. del.icio.us used to use a recency factor as well on its popular page.

Too bad people don't rate comments more. Perhaps if the publisher responded by e-mail with "+1" that could count for a vote, and then I could Fubnub my "Comments of the Week" automatically with the ones that had gotten extra votes on.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

gregorylent — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:32:22 -0000

what odds that this post will get a hundred :) ... i think you are heading towards a daily average of a hundred ...

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

zburt — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:32:56 -0000

i will be very upset if this post gets 100 comments

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

fredwilson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:54:19 -0000

well here are the stats:

i get about 4k visits per day on the web and about 3.2k visits to my feed

so the web is slightly more popular

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

tmarman — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:09:54 -0000

On the other hand, I've noticed a completely opposite phenomenon. Most of my "best" posts have a few, insightful comments (though I get very few comments relative to your blog).

Curiously, many of my "throwaway" posts - like when I vented about how DHL sucks, wrote a quick album review, or talked about locker room etiquette - get tons of comments. My "most active" are, in many ways, not what my blog is about, and I have to think this is relatively common for those of us outside the "A List".

On a related note, I have to imagine as Mark Harrison alluded to, that many of those 44 comments are just people who are putting in a "me too". Then there are those blog comments which you talked about that become posts in their own right. And often I stay out of the comments when there are two many simply because there's too much noise and I feel like my response is easily lost.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

andyswan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:56:23 -0000

Agree. Smart idea.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

dominic — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:45:57 -0000

@MarkHarrison

Our application does exactly that !

As an example, we've aggregated 4500 blogs on Food&Wine, we've automatically id the most influencial blogs and are also gathering compete ranking and frequency of posting along with various info like social profile (linkedn,facebook) of the blogger and ad networks the blog belongs to.

We also have "workgroup" iteraction with the community so that a group of people can collectively comment and track their influence in a community.

Here is a link on our blog with a short study: http://blog.ecairn.com/2008...

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

ckstevenson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:41:57 -0000

I'd love it if you could tag/flag those comments you think are the best, and that they'd then show up in the posts feed via RSS, and they would be clearly visible as "the best" on your blog. Seeing that there are 44 comments on a post is nice, but knowing that you think 8 are really good would get a lot more people to go read them (and comment on them!). 100 comments on a post causes me to not read the comments, there are too many for me to weed through.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

kid mercury — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:28:17 -0000

c'mon now, fred's a blog star, he can't be rollin' up to the game with a template design and somebody else's domain name. that'd be like showing up to the oscars in your pajamas.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Glenn Gillen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:20:30 -0000

Sounds a lot like what Ilya and the guys are doing over at AideRSS, to a certain extent. I'd be overwhelmed without it filtering the rubbish out of many of my more "noisy" feeds.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

falicon — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:18:21 -0000

I read this (and most) blogs the same way...

I'm wondering if Disqus has 'most popular' features for all of their stuff (both related to your specific blog and related to the overall world of blogs they are plugged into)...seems like they should.

I know they haven't released all of their API yet (I'm especially waiting for them to get the 'get_user_posts' part out so I can let people fubnub it), but once they do I'm pretty sure there are going to be a lot of really interesting things people will do with mashing up of comments and using the related data to filter, sort, and improve upon everyone's blog experience...

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

MarkHarrison — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:45:23 -0000

Clearly it would be easy to add a tag / category to your OWN posts and therefore come up with a feed that showed them.

Surely, more interesting would be a blog aggregator that looked across a large number of blogs and ran what for the want of a better word would be a "CommentRank" - clearly having more "interesting" bloggers comment on your blog is better than having, well, me.

I'm now wondering whether there are enough APIs that a new cloud-based service could wander out and do this quickly :-)

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

NinoT — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:31:40 -0000

For what's it worth, I'm not sure how many of your readers care about the design of your blog. I read all my blog posts - including yours - via Google Reader. The only time I go to the actual blog is to comment.

Since many of your users fall into the early adopter crowd and probably have similar browsing habits - you may want to take a quick poll before you invest too much time/effort on a blog redesign.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Peter — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:20:11 -0000

or you could just label them 'Most Active'. that's pretty common.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

David Sonenberg — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:19:59 -0000

I have seen a lot of talk about how blogs are a way to filter information, so it would make sense that comments are a way to filter blogs.