Just browsing through the ‘Best of Bamboo’ on Michele Martin’s blog The Bamboo Project and learned a lot from her post titled Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog. You can read more about this at Michele’s blog, but the six reasons in short are:
- You sound like a press release
- You sound like an informercial
- You sound like a know-it-all
- You haven’t shown them how
- You haven’t created the right atmosphere
- You just don’t seem that into it.
A great list, and one that really got me thinking. My last few posts have included some lengthy accounts of what I’m doing with my classes at school. I’ve specifically been blogging about the videogaming unit that I’m using with my Year 9 G&T class, in part because I know others who are interested in how the unit is working, but also because I am using this blog to store information about this unit as part of an G&T Action Research project I am part of at school. I’ve also started adding detailed info about how I am running an AOS on The Journey with Year 10. This is in part to reflect on my own teaching, but also I have lofty imaginations of teachers scouring the web for units of work and getting really happy when they find my blog with all of this great information!
I find that the problem with such posts is that they don’t explicitly invite discussion or reflection from readers. I think this is a result of reasons 3 and 4 – while I don’t exactly sound like a ‘know-it-all’, I haven’t problematised any of my work, merely recounted what I did; and while readers might technically know how to comment, they can’t see a clear invitation or need to add their thoughts.
What do other people do here? What makes a truly engaging blog post?
Kelli McGraw 
#1 by Michele Martin on August 10, 2008 - 9:29 pm
Hi Kelli–glad you enjoyed the post! I’ve found that there are two kinds of posts that people comment on–the ones where I ask a question or series of questions and the posts where I write something more personally revealing on an emotional level. My “methods” posts–the ones where I talk about how to do something–don’t seem to get as many comments, although they get more bookmarks. When I write posts, I find myself looking for the questions in them to make sure that there’s something that people could respond to in comments. It’s actually changed my blog writing, which definitely used to be much more pedantic. I cringe at some of my earliest posts. 🙂
#2 by kellimcgraw on August 11, 2008 - 6:43 pm
Thanks for the comment Michele! Comments are always so encouraging 🙂
I’m trying to make sure from now on that there is something in my posts for people to respond to, but even now at times I can feel when I write a post whether it’s going to be one that I look back on and cringe at, ha ha!