The 31 Day Comment Challenge

31 day

I’m probably not going to go full depth into this challenge, but I love the idea of connecting with others and I want to be somewhat involved. The idea behind the 31 Day Comment Challenge is to engage bloggers in developing more meaningful discussions and dialogue with other bloggers through the comment/discussion feature on the blogs.

There are prizes and all that, although that doesn’t interest me at all. And although the organizers have suggested using co-comment platform to track comments, I may not do that either. The program seems to have bugs. So, I may just move among the 100 (yep, 100) bloggers who have signed on and engage in conversations that way.

A starting point are these three questions that formulate a sort of self-assessment:

  • How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
    • During a typical week, I comment at about 7 to 10 blogs that I track through my RSS. Many of the bloggers are friends, but I do try to leave comments on blogs that I don’t otherwise have a connection with. If a blog has a theme or writing style that seems interesting, then I will often put it into my RSS and follow the blog from there.
  • Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
    • I track my comments only if the blog has an option to track the comment, and I admit, it does get difficult to follow discussions. It often feels like a hit and miss operation. And I don’t always return to the discussion, even when I am tracking comments.
  • Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?
    • I do tend to comment on a set number of blogs (mostly through connections of various projects that I am engaged in) but I do try to comment once in a while on new blogs, just to extend those connections outward.

And now, I am off to explore some new blogs and leave some trails behind.

Peace (in dialogue),
Kevin

15 Comments
  1. Well
    I just took the plunge into co-comment and have it installed.
    It seems to work fine.
    But I HATE the scrolling advertisements on the bottom of my comment box.
    I know they need money, but that may just drive me wild.
    Kevin

  2. 🙂 re-scrolling advertisements. Lets be honest if I had to do your assessment of commenting practices I would have given you a Gold Star and smile face 🙂 because I know that you spend time visiting and commenting on people’s blog. I appreciated the support you gave me when I started on the Edublogger. So thanks.

  3. Oops sorry I was distracted by kids and noise. I was so excited when I saw you had written 100 participants. So I jumped across to the wiki and suddenly it was 101 and very important 7 student groups (204 students and their 7 teachers). But was so busy trying to write my comment (while getting angry at the kids) that I forgot to get excited and add it to my comment.

  4. If you’re looking for an alternative to coComment, try co.mments.com or commentful. Both of those have been reliable for me and do not interfere with other sites the way coComment does. Personally, I prefer co.mments because the RSS feed shows the full text of the comment, unlike commentful, which just tells me that someone added something to a conversation I’m tracking.

    Using any of these services make it much easier to track the conversations, especially for someone like you who comments so much. It’s less hit and miss and doesn’t rely on the blog itself to have comment tracking.

    I can’t imagine trying to manually track 7-10 conversations a week–there’s no way I’d get back to see the replies!

  5. Definitely an exciting aspect of this challenge is getting to check out some blogs that I haven’t read before (like yours!) I agree that the scrolling ads in coComment are a pain. Prior to this I’ve been using co.mment which is pretty non-intrusive, though it does not automatically track when I comment–I have to remember to click the ‘Track co.mments’ button on my tool-bar. Sue Waters has a great post on co.mment if you’re interested (http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/2008/02/10/how-to-effectively-manage-your-comments-on-other-peoples-blogs/). Cheers!

  6. Hi Kevin,
    Thanks for visiting my blog and leaving a comment about LibraryThing. I then visited your blog and read some posts. I particularly enjoyed the Love That Dog by Sharon Creech post as it captured the essence of that sweet book and it was fun to see how you engaged your students with it!
    See you around!

  7. Thanks to all of you for your comments.
    It’s always nice to see some new avatar faces in the ol’ comment bin.
    I agree with Christy — manually tracking any meaningful conversation seems unwieldy to anyone with a life outside of the Web.
    So, I am enjoying this experiment with CoComment, after all.
    See you around (cyber)town

    Kevin

  8. Hey!! You test blogged me – I didnt feel a thing and to pay you back , ahem , I mean reward you, I am now using you as my Day 2 activity.
    The difficulty I am having with blogging on new blogs is that I tend to read within the limits of edubloggers because that’s where my interest in blogging lies; makes sense I guess. CoComments has me a but baffled still because of familiarity with it mostly. Well hey, its Sunday morning, at least I am trying.

  9. Well
    I feel rewarded.
    Thanks for stopping by.
    I, too, am getting my feet wet with Co-Comment. I can see its value, though.
    It’s still Saturday night here, so you are way ahead of me, friend.
    Peace
    Kevin

  10. Hey Kevin! Thanks for stopping by my blog today! I may be reading much more into this than what was intended, but I think the point of the Comment Challenge is to remind us that we can all be part of “the conversation”, part of “the network”. You stated it: “I love the idea of connecting with others”. That’s the point. You and I first connected a year ago on Classroom 2.0 and so much has changed since then. There are so many ways to connect! Twitter and Diigo are two that are at the top of my list at the moment. So use whatever verb you want – blog, comment, tweet, tag… (are these really verbs?); do whatever you can to be part of the network. The learning possibilities are endless…

  11. Kevin,

    You certainly connected with me when you left a comment on my “This I Believe” meme offering. If you ever decide to post your beliefs here, on your blog, I’d be happy to link to it.

    diane

  12. Christy, Cocomment has now added a feed that shows all the latest comments not just one comment at a time. They are working to improve this feed because we’ve told them this is what we want. Here is my feed so you can check it out in Google Reader — provided people follow my directions for subscribing to their feed this is the one they will grab.

  13. Hi Kevin
    nice to see you on Spinning a Learning Web and especially with your offer to have a go at a video mashup. I’m going to set up the group on Flickr and blog about it on Spinning … . Watch out for it!

  14. Sue, both coComment and co.mments do full text of feeds with multiple comments in one post. There is a third option, commentful, which is a Firefox extension that only shows that a new comment was made but doesn’t include the text.

    My biggest problem with coComment is that it prevents me from actually leaving comments as long as it’s enabled. Sort of defeats the purpose of a comment tracker if you have to turn it off every time you want to actually submit the comment, huh? I did briefly reinstall it for this challenge, just to see if they’d fixed the problems, but it still won’t work on my system. When I try to submit, it says it’s sending to the coComment server, but then hangs indefinitely. I literally stopped it after waiting 10 minutes for it to finish. Honestly, if it needs more than 10 minutes, I don’t have time for it anyway; co.mments takes maybe 20 seconds. My experiences with coComment’s customer service have been, shall we say, less than positive, so I’m not interested in talking to them again. I don’t need that kind of drama in my life!

  15. Wow
    Christy, that does seem strange.
    So far, CoComment has worked like a charm for me.
    I wonder if it is a browser issue.
    Ten minutes is a lifetime in this world, I agree, and no one needs more drama (unless that is the kind of person you are).
    I say, whatever platform works for you, go with it.
    Kevin

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