Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 by Andy Beal

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Blog Comments Cannot Be Ignored

Price again, this time with details of a study (pdf) conducted by Buzzmetrics which offers some interesting data on blog comments. As suspected, you can’t accurately monitor blogs, without monitoring comments.

As the report concludes…

…according to our analysis, comments constitute a substantial part of the blogosphere, accounting for up to 30% of the volume of weblog posts themselves…we show that usage of comments improves weblog retrieval (in terms of number of results), and is beneficial for ranking weblog posts in new, potentially useful ways.

We discuss comments as an indicator of the popularity of weblog posts and weblogs themselves, and find —as expected— that a wealth of comments in a weblog is a good indication for the significance of the weblog.

Finally, we offer a novel way to determine the level of controversy caused by a weblog post by analyzing the type of comments written in response.


Social Media Monitoring in Just 60-Seconds. Guaranteed!

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2 comments on “Blog Comments Cannot Be Ignored”

  1. Michael @ SEOG.net Says:

    April 19th, 2006 at 11:29 pm

    I agree Andy — but why haven’t more blogging engines implemented RSS for comments? That seems to be the missing link that can make blogging a more dynamic enterprise.

    When you reply to an email and they reply back, it comes back to you. If you reply to a blog and then blog owner gets back to you, in most cases, there is no easy way for you to be notified that a comment has been made. There needs to be a better way to truly promote dialog in the blogosphere.

  2. marianne richmond Says:

    April 20th, 2006 at 3:36 am

    Thanks for the data…always helpful to have.
    Marianne