When I started my blog I had heard various opinions on whether you should have comments on or off. Some of the opinions amongst the Blog leaders;
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Steve Pavlina – His feeling is that as your traffic grows it becomes time consuming to maintain the comments, and because the small handful of  people that comment don’t represent the overall view off your mass readership, it can end up taking you off course. Steve also mentions other alternatives, such as e-mails, forums and opening certain post to commenting when desired.
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ProBlogger –  Darren Rowse doesn’t’ take a hard line view. When your post has an interactive nature you should have comments on, if it’s a news report maybe you would turn them off. Within the context of ProBlogger comments on is a definite.
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John TP – “But what if your blog is new or has low traffic? Most of your posts will then have no comments and it will likely turn away new visitors as they will feel that no one reads your blog.
In this situation the best thing to do is to disable comments and enable it back when you have about 500 unique visitors a day or say about 100 RSS subscribers.â€Â
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Though I see the logic of all the opinions, I will continue to keep my comments on indefinitely.
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One of the ideas that appealed to me when I was introduced to Blogging, was the idea of social networking. In the past when I would sit and reflect on different thoughts, or write in my journal, it was always a solitary act. With the advent of the Blog I now had the opportunity to not only share my ideas in an open forum, but to get feedback from other readers, and to hear their thoughts and feelings.
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If your comments are off and you are getting 1,000,000 hits/month and growing to your blog, you might feel that you have validated the decision. You are still successful, people continue to come to your site, comments are obviously not so important. The Wall Street Journal had over 4 million hits last month, but they are not trying to interact with their reader, they are informing them.
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If you want to be a source of information then don’t call yourself a Blog, because I feel the essence of Blog is interaction, community, sharing.
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With regards to not commenting on posts that have zero comments read my next post 37. Are You A Commenting Coward?
