When I first read about it, the 31day Comment Challenge was one of those things I skipped over. I think if it were running over the summer I’d be more likely to get involved, but at this time of year I don’t have the time to commit to changing my online behaviour in a fairly major way.
What got me thinking about it again was a post over on Doug Johnson’s blog about his views on Twitter. His fears about the politics of Twitter chime with my worries about commenting on blogs. What if I say the ‘wrong thing’? What if I offend the person who wrote the post? What could I possibly have to say that could be of any benefit here?
The rational part of my brain tells me I’m being daft. As a blogger I love getting comments, even the ones from people who disagree with me (sometimes I like those the best, it forces me to either rethink my ideas or engage further and explain better - and I do enjoy a good argument!). But I can’t shake the worry enough to be as prolific a commentator as I would like.
But the comment challenge and Doug’s post coming into my thinking at more or less the same time makes me think that I’m going to try and do something about it over the next few weeks. My biggest obstacle at the moment is that as great a tool as CoComment is, it rather assumes that people read and comment on blogs from one computer, and for me it more usually one of about five. As such, I haven’t got a much use out of it as I hope when I joined it. In the short term I’m finding blogs that offer email updates of comments the most useful (Now added here thanks to this plug in). In the longer term I’d love to see the option to subscribe to comments from a specific post included with Google Reader.
As an aside both Clay and Arthus dismiss the challenge as contrived and schooly. On this occasion I think they’re wrong. One of the jobs of school (or in this case our online learning community) should be to expose people to new ideas, through contrived means if necessary. The range of experiences is more important than making each one authentic.

