Being the type of person that is interested in the folks that drop by here I keep an eye on the MyBlogLog widget in the sidebar for new faces that show up on occasion. Besides it being nice that new people are taking the time to visit and read, it also gives me an opportunity to check out new sources of information and thought. Now not all new faces take me to blogs that are of interest but every once in awhile one does pop up and they find their way into my feed reader for regular reading.

Today was one of those days when I saw the avatar of Adam Ostrow (hint: real people avatars will always get my attention over company logos or inappropriate avatars) and hyperlinked my way to his blog of the same name. After reading a few of his posts I made sure to add his blog feed to FeedDemon and went on my way figuring that was it for today.

Well it turns out I was a little wrong in that assumption because very shortly afterwards his post about Blog Comments came through and caught my attention because this is a subject of interest to me. In his post he equates the current state of blog comments to “class participation grades”

I’m noticing a similar phenomenon in the blogosphere, where dozens of comments are left on the most highly trafficked blogs that add little value to the conversation. For example, yesterday TechCrunch, the #1 blog for Web 2.0 news, announced the hiring of a CEO. As I write this, there are 58 comments on the post, only a handful of which aren’t either pats on the back or re-phrasing what the first few commentators wrote. I realize the importance of commenting, and have read about it dozens of times on the “blogs about blogging.” But does reading “Congrats, hope everything will work out great” inspire me to visit the blog of the commenter? Further, does it stand a chance of grabbing Mike Arrington’s (TechCrunch’s founder and Editorial Chief) attention?

Adam does raise a valid point about this ego massaging commenting practice and I can really relate to the frustration over seeing comment after comment doing nothing more than add white noise to the conversation. Now to be fair I probably have two trackbacks in the comment chain for the article Adam mentioned. However the first is linked to a post I wrote that used the announcement as an example point and the second while it did congratulate Mike it also was a part of a larger thought so I like to think that I didn’t contribute to the noise but rather added to a conversation or included the post in a conversation.

That’s the thing about blogging and comments that was impressed on me from the beginning by people like Robert Scoble and other influential bloggers - blogging is the creation of a conversation and as important as the original post is the follow up comment train is equally as important. What is happening though is that these fanboy type comments do more to dilute the conversation to the point that the conversation becomes inane.

I don’t see this fanboy practice changing - if anything it may even get worse especially among the big blogs and I can see the time coming where any serious conversations that happen will be in the second tier of blogs. We’ll let the TechCrunch and Om Malik’s have their fanboys but in turn the real discussions will be happening elsewhere.

I wonder what the value of the big blogs will be then?

[tags]blogs, blogging, bloggers, comments, fanboys, TechCrunch[/tags]

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