How to be an Authority Commenter

Let me start by assuming that your name is Vijayendra Mohanty and you don’t have a blog.

Good news is – your name is Vijayendra Mohanty. It’s not a special name by any stretch of imagination. But it is your name. So it is important.

So here you are, online and trying to make sense of the blogosphere. You read up acres and acres worth of beginners’ guides on the web and chat up scores of seasoned bloggers and web professionals. They inspire and motivate but you end up more confused than when you started.

You decide to start by lurking at some select joints in the blogosphere. You pick up RSS feeds left, right, and centre and read (as best as you can) the hell out of them. You give up on all but a few of them a week or so later. This is also the time when you start paying more attention to the few feeds that you are still reading.

You start clicking over to some of the blog posts and see a veritable torrent of comments under each write-up (you wouldn’t choose anything less than a pro blog, would you?). People are speaking their minds, letting the blogger know how wise, insightful, stupid, or short-sighted he/she is.

You realise you can contribute to this conversation. A lot of these people are not really saying anything. You can actually answer some of these questions and probably even introduce angles nobody has raised (noticed?) yet.

So you put the carat in the comment field and type out your point of view. After that, you set right (politely of course) a few of the buffoons that got to the thread before you did. Then you unassumingly sign the comment Vijayendra Mohanty and leave the URL field blank (you don’t have a blog, remember?).

The next day, you go back to the thread. There are more comments. Your heart jumps! People have taken the time to acknowledge your comment. Some agree with what you say and some don’t. But you are present there alright! You even get an @ reply from the blogger.

Pleased with yourself, you learn a valuable lesson – the web is about presence. Brochure-type websites for companies, photo blogs and galleries for professional photographers, tech blogs for those who know their machines. If you don’t blog, your name is your presence.

It represents you on comment threads. It is what you are known as to anyone who has ever been to the blogs you frequent. You are a known quantity.

If all the comments you have ever made on any blog post were to be aggregated on one web page (blog?), they would show a pattern, wouldn’t they? Your interests, you choice of topics, your use of language. Your general way of dealing with disagreement and with other people. Your personality!

Actually, it is not that IF a situation. If you have ever commented on a blog that uses Disqus Comments, you already have a page like that. Here, for example, is the disqus page of Karen Swim – a commenter on this blog. People can even subscribe to your comments the way they would subscribe to your blog (if you had one). There are other comment services like Disqus, (eg: IntenseDebate and SezWho) but I only have first hand experience with Disqus.

Taking comments responsibly can prove to be a powerful pre-launch strategy if you want to start a blog some time soon. But you might want to hurry up and get that vmohanty.com domain that has become such hot property, thanks to you obsessive, incessant, and insightful commenting.