BAST: No Comments = Better Bloggers?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m part of a group of great WoW Bloggers that hang out at a place called Blog Azeroth (BA). Each week people over at BA come up with some ideas for fellow bloggers to blog about if they choose, and the one for this week happens to be Shared Topic: No Comments = Better Bloggers?. (BAST = Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, by the way.)

This blog is meant to help you level your characters in the game, but it’s my blog so I don’t mind making a bit of a side trip to tell you a bit about leveling your blog instead (if you happen to have one).

Our shared topic to blog about this time is:

Would we become better bloggers if we did not receive any comments?

It’s an interesting question to be sure, but mostly because the answer is going to be different for everyone.

For me it really kind of goes both ways. I had no comments when I first started blogging and in an attempt to get comments I changed how I did things. I would agree that I’ve become better at blogging, but I don’t know that it’s really tied into the comments.

Do I like getting comments? Heck yeah! Does not getting them make me try harder to blog? I can’t say that it does to be quite honest.

Would writing what it really is you want to write make you truer to the purpose that you started the blog for?

I think I already write about what I really want to write about. The blog here is dedicated to helping you level your characters and that’s what I try to accomplish. Do I like blogging about the topic? I love it. Not only is it something for other people to use in their own journey, it’s also a map for me to look back on when the time comes for me to roll another character and decide whether I want to repeat a previous process, jump to a new one, or change my mind about leveling the character in the first place (freaking warrior class).

I write to educate and inform. It’s what I want to do, it’s why I blog, and I feel it’s what I’m accomplishing right now.

I’m like the scribe hidden away in the dark recesses of the library, jotting down all the wisdom I can on the scrolls that I have available to me. Whether others read them and praise me, or they simply throw them away matters not to me. I make my contribution, such that it is, and it’s a tool for others to use as they please.

To write exactly whatever is in your head, rather than worrying about whether or not anyone will find it “interesting” or “good enough” to comment on? For the joy of writing?

This is another thing that I do right now. I really don’t care whether people find what I write to be the best information in the world or the most worthless piece of crap out there. I like to write and I like to write in the style that I’ve been using. As long as I find the writing interesting and it’s something that I would have found useful myself then I’m happy with it.

Or are comments integral to your blogging experience and if you don’t have them, you don’t write?

If I stopped blogging because I didn’t get comments I would have given up a hundred times over by now. I do have a desire to generate more comments, but I realize from doing this over the last year that how I write and what I write about isn’t really the kind of blogging that fits with comments. What more can you really say than “thanks”, “nice read”, “I did it this way”, “wish you wrote that 2 months ago”, and so on. I don’t write in a conversation- or reply-provoking style, I’m more like a book of facts that you reference, and I’m fine with that. I’d love to have people commenting and discussing on here, but much of what I write is not done in a manner that that fits that.