The Blog Comment Challenge – Completed

After extending my “challenge” an extra month in an effort to catch up, I”m calling an end of sorts to the effort. Some thoughts:

1) There are a lot of good blogs out there, churning out a lot of interesting content. I wouldn’t say there is too much good stuff out there, but keeping up with the small number of folks I follow definitely took a concerted effort.

2) Finding something worthwhile to say is hard!  I don’t know if I went through all of the stages of grief, but I definitely went through one (Bargaining) before getting to this point (Acceptance). Originally I wanted to comment on everything I read.  Then as I slipped behind, I rationalized “I’ll only comment on real posts, not podcast episodes or “I won’t be posting for a while” posts. Then I eventually decided if I couldn’t think of a relevent comment within two minutes of reading, I just wouldn’t comment.

3) I found the best way to keep comments useful was to ask questions.  It kept me from posting “Wow, that’s nice” type comments.  It also has the nice side-effect of engaging the blog writer and commenter in a conversation, rather than just the blogger writing and hoping someone will read.

I ended up making ~70 comments at over 20 different blogs.  If anyone is interested, I can add the list of links to those comments. As I look at the list, I notice that my type-A personality came out a bit in the results.  The blogs that came first alphabetically (and thus appear atop my favorites list) had more comments than those near the bottom.  This is likely due to me trying to “catch up” on my list and starting from the top – hardly ever getting to those blogs named near the end of the alphabet.  Please don’t take offense, Kari or Tom!

Hopefully I’ve left some interesting questions, ideas, or observations throughout the online woodworking community. I want to thank the other bloggers who have taken their time not only to produce great content, but to take my “bait” and engage with your readers.

Postscript – I don’t intend for this to signal and end to my commenting, but rather an end to my attempt at commenting on everything.