This past Sunday Virginia Heffernan wrote a column in the New York Times magazine about the challenges with reader comments. She points to shortcomings of comment systems as one reason, which I believe is correct (and is why I love using disqus). But more important than that I believe is author engagement with reader comments. Funnily enough that is the first thing that many of the commenters on the online version of the column point out. In fact, reading the online version provided a lot more value because of the comments thus weakening the original criticism. Returning to engagement with readers – this is where disqus really shines because of the ability to receive and then respond to comments via email. I don’t get a lot of comments (yet) and disqus makes it easy for me to at least try to respond to everyone of them. I am always impressed that Fred manages to do so at much higher volume. Doing so produces a much deeper and engaged discussion. Knowing that comments will require responses to maintain a real dialog is a big enough hurdle that some people don’t enable comments in the first place or even shy away from posting at all (or even from tweeting given replies). I understand the difficulty especially when someone is not in control of their schedule. But for folks with an audience there is so much to gain from engaging that I believe we will continue to see improvement in tools. I for one hope to have more comments to reply to. PS Will add links later - written on my BlackBerry
