Evil Home Stereo

Nico Lumma brought the bad news: His wife Sibylle wants to stop blogging. She doesn’t feel satisfied with the number of readers of her blog. Actually is it the low number of comments on her texts which disappoint her and from which she draws the conclusion that there aren’t many people reading her stuff.

Articles like these two are the ones which make her blog worth reading: Short stories about everyday events, written in a casual way with a subtle jibes. They are fun to read in a short break between two lines of code. But what should I comment on them? “Hey, nice article, I liked it!”? Mnah, sorry, I’m not the kind of person for such insubstatial comments (especially if I’d been the fifth person who says so). As long as there isn’t something which bothers me about an article, I enjoy it (or not) and stay quiet. And I guess I’m not the only one who acts like this; so just the fact that you don’t get many comments doesn’t mean that nobody reads what you write. Always keep the lurking crowd in mind.

Another reason why I seldom comment on blog articles (and don’t have a comment function myself) is that from one comment often a longer discussion springs to life. And it’s rude not to reply on a comment of yours. So to avoid this you’ve got to keep track of quite some articles you once commented on. Should I visit those pages every day? Or add yet another RSS feed to track? No. As long as commenting on blogs isn’t as simple as using my newsreader, I keep quiet. (But I have an idea how to change this… let’s see what will come.)