The Plugin

BlogFollow automatically puts a snippet from the commentor's blog into the comment. Kind of like a signature to the comment. Full details and download link are now available.

The Reasoning

I read a post on the blog FuzzyFuture the other day that intrigued me. The post was about the "iFollow" movement, which calls for the removal of the nofollow tag from comment links. The thought being to encourage user participation, by providing a reward. I love the concept, but I think the implementation misses the mark.

Maybe I'm being idealistic, but removing the nofollow link is a tangible reward in the sense it helps SEO and PR, not by driving readers to the commenter's blog. An actual human reader has no concept of what attributes are assigned to the link. Therefor the only way this helps drive actual readers is indirectly through improved search ranking. But much of the value in SEO/PR is in increased ad sales.

It's pretty clear the iFollow movement doesn't really increase traffic to the blog directly from the comment. That's why I created the BlogFollow plugin.

A lot of what my bloglines subscriptions are sites I found from comments left in other sites. I'll read a comment, if I feel it's intelligent, informative or entertaining I'll often click on their name to see what their site is like. I'll generally subscribe to the site if it looks halfway decent and give it a few weeks trial.

I hope the BlogFollow plugin will help with clickthrus on comments. It gives a bit more content from the commentor to help encourage users to click. I like this approach over iFollow because it drives users directly to the commentor's blog.

Both parties win. The blog running the plugin would conceivable get more content and user interaction. The commentor's get their blog presented to a wider audience.

The Spam Issue

The obvious concern is an increase in spam. I think this will be minimal because the comment itself still has to get through whatever akisment, spamblocker, spam mutilator your already running. Conceivably someone could put up a blog of \/iagra links and hot stock tips, then go leave meaningful comments to get their content on your site. However blogfollow strips out all html/javasript, so there won't be any actual links (other than the one set by the plugin in the post title) or XSS attacks.

Yes, someone could use the permalink in their feed to point to something spammy and then go around and write great comments to trick people into clicking the link. In the end it's still up to the site owner to police their own site.

The plugin is running on this blog right now, so go ahead and leave a comment on this post to see it in action.