Last week, I participated in a Commentathon via Blogelina. I was in Group 1. If you go to that link, you will see the links to all of the blogs that were in my group. The goal of the Commentathon was to leave a comment on each of the blogs in my group, making sure they were meaningful comments! And to receive 50 comments on my blog post in return. I chose to submit my blog post about September 11th. Here are some of my thoughts on the experience!
– I wanted to have my blog post go live on September 11th, but the rules stated I had to have my post live by the day before the Commentathon started. I figured this was so the moderators could verify that the links submitted were working and appropriate links. However, I was disappointed to note that there were mistakes in the list of links – I found at least 4 mistakes including one that was coded wrong, one post that was not live until later in the day that I was reading, and one link that went to a website rather than to a specific blog post. So I guess I could have had my post go live when I wanted it to go live, hmm.
– I wrote my post about September 11th because I felt it would be a universal topic. It seemed like it was and the comments were lovely to read. While many of the posts I read for the Commentathon were very interesting, some of them were not very broad topics and were more difficult to leave comments on.
– Some of the more interesting topics included a post about the child’s inner voice, a fall bucket list, all about blog giveaways, and the meaning of the term “Selah” for example!
– When we were finished commenting on all 50 blogs, we were to leave a comment on the main Blogelina post saying we’d finished. The first person who said she finished seemed to have skipped my blog! I also noticed she only left very short comments on other blogs. We were supposed to leave meaningful comments and I tried to do that on all the posts.
– As I read through the posts, I made sure to also check out the bloggers’ “about me” page and some of their other posts to see if I wanted to become a follower for their blog. I ended up following a few of the blogs that way!
– Most of the blogs did not use blogger as their platform. Those that did tended to use word verification on comments, PLUS the comment would have to be approved by the blogger! That seems a bit redundant to me.
– Even though I asked on my post for the commenters to leave their email in their reply, most did not. I almost wish I’d have switched to disqus commenting before the Commentathon – that way I could have replied to their comments even though I did not have their email addresses. I also noticed that most commenters didn’t mention the Commentathon at all. When I was leaving my comments I included that I was stopping by from the Commentathon!
Would I do something like this again? Absolutely! It was a lot of fun, I got to read posts about things I might never have read from bloggers I never would have met, and I got a lot of traffic to my blog! Did anyone else participate? Would you do so in the future?