Would you walk into a crowded room, filled with people you didn't know and shout out "Hey, anyone want to tell me their life story?" I guess the answer would be no.
However, online the request for comment is significant and also expected to a certain extent. It's difficult to know why people don't see a difference, but this is our take on the subject. Obviously, feel free to share your comments (ha ha he he)!
Firstly, most regular online activity is more conversational, long gone are the days of simple static pages. We are in the age of social networking and this is all about expression and collective discussion. Therefore you have to have an outlet for these dialogues and the perfect way to do this is through comments, feedback, RSS feeds etc.
The next part is about developing a community, this takes time as people, lets face it, don't necessarily trust everyone else just because they say they are trustworthy. So encouraging readership is done through promoting discussion. Hence the request for comment.
Above we added a very soft request for comment, did you spot it? However, you don't have to be so reserved, you can just write an entire post dedicated to requesting comments. See todays post at Daily Blog Tips and see how they have proactively focused an entire blog post on getting readers to comment. It worked too, at the time of writing this, they were up to 32 comments. I think these include some replies from the author but still, a great response in less than a day.
Give it a try, ask for comments in your posts or write a post dedicated to getting comments! If you do, let us know and we'll sure get the ball rolling for you. All you have to do, you guessed it, is post a comment here and ask!
Happy days everyone!