I have been playing the sims the last few days. Before that, I was cleaning like crazy. It was weird. Anyway, the sims… last night when I went to bed, my eyes were a bit stingy and I think I’ve suffered permanent nerve damage in my tailbone. But that’s what it’s like with the sims, I don’t play for a long time, but when I do I play a lot and for several days.
Anyway, I have a question that’s long been on my mind. It’s about blog comments. It’s two questions I want to ask you really.
1. If you are a blogger, how do you handle your comments? Do you reply directly to people by email? Do you respond in the comments section of your own blog? Do you even reply at all?
2. If you are a commenter on many blogs, how do you like your comments handled? Do you like them to be acknowledged in the comments section? Do you go back and check for responses? Do like to get emails if you comment warrants a response?
I ask because I go back and forth. As a commenter, I don’t always go back to a post to see if my comments are acknowledged, I read too many blogs. Many blogs have “Subscribe to this post” features and I really like that. It allows me to get email follow up comments on any posts on which I comment, if I so choose. Some people get soooo many comments, I don’t really want an email follow up for each one. I like the conversational tone of acknowledging comments in the comments section, and I like the idea that other people can see your response. In the past, this is how I handled all comments.
On the other hand, there are blogs that acknowledge my comments with emails and I really like that too. I’ve gotten to know certain bloggers better, simply because of an established email relationship. I tend to do that a bit more now, email responses to commenters. I always try to send an email response to a new commenter no matter what, just to say “hi!” But I miss the conversational tone my comments used to have back in the day.
So its a quandary to me, how to handle comments. I was curious what you guys thought, what you prefer.