Blogs and forums were one of the first forms of social interaction on the web. The reason they worked so well is because people wanted to have conversations on the web. It’s the main reason behind the success of sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.
So why the post?
Subscribing to comments made on a blog post after you comment on it yourself is somewhat of a rarity now. This leads to fly-by comments of people that leave good arguments to the original post and get a bunch of replies, but the original poster is no where to be found to defend or promote the content they added.
But I get too much email already!
If you’re interested enough in the story to comment on it you’re probably interested in what other’s might also be saying. Â However, it can get overwhelming if you subscribe to a post on a popular blog. I don’t usually notice the overwhelming effects of that because I use Gmail which groups all of those conversations together into one line item instead of a single line for each response.
How Do I Subscribe?
Each blog type has its own subscription method for comments. WordPress allows you to subscribe to comments on the post you commented on, blogger/blogspot allows you to click a link to subscribe via email if you’re currently logged into your Google account. If a blog you’re commenting on uses Disqus to manage their comments you’ll need a Disqus account and there are settings on the notifications page that will allow you to turn all notifications on or off for other comments on a post that you comment on.
What do I get out of this?
A chance to interact and make blog reading more interactive and rewarding for yourself and the blogger. Let’s face it, this is really a ploy to get comments on my blog, but it’s really the smaller bloggers out there that you’d have a better chance at interacting with the writer. The larger blogs have so many readers that you’ll rarely get a reply from the author.
