I accept being way out of sync with the current state of connected communications, holding stubbornly to ideas as old as a well chewed bone that no one else desired. An old bone, indeed. Hey, beyond bloggingaboutblogging I invent bloggingaboutnotblogging (newly minted tag)?
A well worn topic here is the idea of commenting on blogs as a form of blogging itself (tagged blogmenting), writing in the spaces of other people’s blogs. Twenty blog years ago I reflected on the idea of Francois the Comment Blogger (actually spotted back in 2003 as Blogging in the Margins) who, in a weird twist of accidents, I actually “met” last year, in, as expected, the comments space of a post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Rather epic, I thought!
All of this leading up to an idea in 2007 where it was a major thing to give up, of “muzzling” posting on my own blog for a whole week (can you imagine) and spending that week reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. I repeated this in 2008, 2009, 2010,… and took 15 years off before picking it in 2025.
I had usually done this in February, and had “plans” to return this year, so hey, here I am two months late.
Now of course, given that like 94.6% of people who previously blogged (made up statistic) do not any more, what is the bog sacrifice? The whole space of connecting through comments has pretty music been desiccating by taking that energy and effort into external places of social media, severed from our blogs. And of those remaining blogs, like 68.2% (made up too) have removed comments as even an option.
I thought about this reading danah boyd’s post Where has Social Media gone? (a great read). She closes at the end with “And if you have feels, push back! I’d love to hear your thoughts!!!” but how? Her original blog has no means to do that. The Ghost version of her blog as Made Not Found even if I log in, does not have a place to respond?
It seems telling to me.
Alas, so just giving up my own blogging for a week does not seem much, so here’s my only partly thought out idea- I will also [mostly] muzzle by usual outputs in Mastodon, now that is something to give up. I wil take that time to read a lot of blog posts, where I can comment, and slip in to my comment the text #CogDogCommentBlogging26 and then I will just post to Mastodon a link to where I am commenting tagged same.
As part of the past efforts here, I generate some stats for my own blog activity, using some special MySQL queries to pull out per year, total number of posts, number of comments, number of unique commenters into a google sheet of all CogDogBlog stats Back to the Beginning of Blog Time – look charted data!
Now hold the dog bus, you might say- look at the huge spike of comments in 2025, where’s the problem? That’s an artifcact of enabling the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on the site, those record numbers include all the likes, boosts that get fed into the comments table. I might have to wrangle a new query to filter them out. A task for another day.
At least for posts, I had a positive blip from the declining trend in 2025 and 4 months into the year, I’m at more than half of that total. It’s a BULL market, folks! But wow, look at those peak blogging years of 2005. Crazy. Was I even working?
Lastly, I do have a query to retrieve the top commenters for the 2025 year
SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= '2025-01-01' AND comment_date < '2026-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC;The results are again, with me at the top of my charts! I am the most active commenter (there is duplication from comments via Fedviserse reply and direct to blog). I am running out of time to make this a pretty table, so a screen shot of the text (I cut off the tail end at less than 5)
Well, that’s enough, I am supposed to muzzle the blog today, and get out there and comment. If you got blog or a post I should attend to, I ma taking suggestions, otherwise I rely on my usual RSS feeds and Mastodon reading (mostly reading this week).
See you on the other side, when the muzzle is removed…. if I remove it.
Keep on blogging! And be old school and give out some human direct comments, it feeds the bloggers soul.
Featured Image: Dog with party hat and muzzle at a loud event looking scared, crazed and helpless flickr photo by Ivan Radic shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license this is so how dignified I am in my withering intents!
Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
It’s been a while, and it’s gonna take me a bit to get back to reading a variety of blogs, let alone commenting on them… I mean, I do read what people write on their blogs, but usually because they’ve posted about it on Mastodon.
Although the first baby steps back into blogworld is to follow active blogs in my RSS reader (currently Currents). And I will comment on occasion…and work to shake off the rust.
This thing is definitely “on” for a direct comment! Always.
I have no expectations for anyone else and I have my own doubts of really doing it. I see no issue of where you hear of posts, I will pull from Mastodon and email and even if I glance out the window and see a bird flying past with a blog post in its mouth.
How is Currents working for you?