2.7 Dialogue
If bloggers can in some cases be compared to talk radio personalities, then those who comment on others' blogs are like the listeners who frequently call in to radio stations to voice opinions of their own. As in radio, the comments section is often the most interesting area of a blog. It's where the blogger's one-sided opinion is tested and turned into debate and dialogue (at its best) or name-calling and nonsense (at its worst).
The blogging communities that we discussed on the previous page often come to life through the comments sections of the various blogs. For some closely-knit groups, blog comments serve essentially the same function as email, instant messaging, and discussion forums: a venue for carrying on simple conversations, telling jokes, making plans, and disseminating information.
As a side note, when I recently announced on my own site that I would be taking a brief hiatus from blogging, I was overwhelmed by the numbers of people who wished me well in the comments section, people whom I had never met and whom I had no idea were even reading. It made me think that perhaps "virtual community" is not the oxymoron I had always imagined it to be.
Every major blogging utility now includes fully-customizable commenting features. Third-party tools such as HaloScan also offer free commenting services for those who don't like the functionality of their blogger tool's internal service or who, for whatever reason, want to keep their blog content separate from the comments.
A word of warning: blogs that address sensitive content (politics and religion, specifically) are particularly prone to attracting, um, heated comments. Those who leave vitriolic and often simple-minded comments are known by several colorful euphemisms, the politest and most common of which is "flamers." In recognition of this problem, most blogging tools now allow you to turn comments on and off for a particular post, and you can even go so far as to block the flamer's IP address (the unique number assigned to every computer that accesses the Internet), preventing him or her from commenting again.
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A Little Tip
Most blogging tools also include a feature called "trackback," which will note on your blog every time one of your posts is linked from another site.
