a typical shoutbox
Do you enjoy talking with people a lot? That might be one of the reasons you enjoy blogging. After all, you get all sorts of people from different backgrounds and countries talking with you. It facilitates an exhange of thoughts online.
How would you like your comments to appear on your blog? Would you like a place where your readers could easily say what they think? Would you like you and your blog readers to have a chat mechanism of sorts on your blog? Some people place chat boxes or shoutboxes on their blogs for that. Comments are usually for, well, comments that are related to individual entries.
Having a shoutbox on your blog could be quite fun. Imagine passersby who just wanted to say ‘Hi!’ or old friends who just stumbled upon your blog. It would be easy for them to leave you a message on a shoutbox instead of looking for an entry which they could comment on. And it would allow everyone else to also talk to each other on your blog.
Comment forms are common in blogs. A lot of blogs have them automatically on while others opt to switch them off for some reason or another. It makes flow of conversations easier because you remain on topic. If you have different kinds of categories on your blog and it so happened you have a discussion on Japanese pop culture in one entry, at least whoever wants to discuss it with you could do so specifically on that page.
Contact forms are also useful sometimes. It is a general form for feedack on your blog. Instead of them emailing you by getting your email address and all that, they could simply submit their queries and feedback via that contact form.
Originally posted on July 11, 2006 @ 12:21 am
