wading into comments

Well, not much success with my first concerted effort at posting comments on online stories.  I commented on three stories. The first was on Yahoo about the Tennessee women’s basketball team beating Vanderbilt. I wrote:

"Funny that Coach Balcomb beat Tennessee when she was coach of Xavier in the tournament, 

but has never beat them since becoming coach of Vandy."

This was my most successful comment of the three, which leads me to the only valuable piece of advice I have to offer from this exercise: If you post incorrect comments, people will respond:

 "Wrong! Check your facts before you post. It makes you look stupid."

The other response was a post of the score and date of the last Vanderbilt win over Tennessee. Actually, I learned something else that I can offer in the way of advice; don't post at 3 am, especially when you've been drinking. There were other comments on this story, but none inspired by me. I was entertained to see that two people voted "thumbs up" on my post. They must have been Tennessee fans who enjoyed me saying something negative about Vanderbilt, even if it was wrong.

The second story was from barstool about a 17 year old softball player from New Zealand making the Red Sox spring training roster (thanks Tori!). I posted a comment degrading beer league softball. The only comment after mine was a youtube link that was unrelated. It could be that I was too late to the party. The story was posted about two days before I commented.

I tried to comment on a Globe story, but after signing up with them, enabling cookies and java script, I still couldn't post any comments. So the third story I commented on was a Boston Herald article about J.D. Drew being injured again, before the season has even started. I commented within four hours, but mine is the first and last one. I thought this would be sufficiently annoying to Sox fans, and that the Herald has enough readers, that someone else would comment.

Facebook went much better, and that's not surprising. Facebook is a self-selecting group. Your friends are much more likely to agree with you, be interested in similar subjects, think like you do, etc. 

The first one was a friend saying "I'll just be happy if I don't get thrown up on today." (his wife and kids have been sick several times each over the last few weeks)

I commented:

It's good to have goals.
To which another friend said:
Correction: it's good to have achievable goals. Maybe you should just wear rain gear and accept the inevitable.
Several other people commented also.

The second was a friend talking about how
working at Pizza Factory helped him make pizzas with his sons
I commented "that muscle memory, lasts a lifetime"

This lead to 39 comments among several other people talking about when many of us worked there and the connections we made and other topics.

Both of those are good example of how the interpersonal nature of Facebook makes sharing comments so much easier due to your shared history. 
The third Facebook comment was about Huffington Post being bought by AOL.
This was different because it was a national story instead of "friends sharing what's happening" type of post.
It also led to in interesting discussion with people I didn't know.
I wrote: "AOL is still around? what for?" 
Two people "liked" it, and it lead to several more comments.

One of them was a link to an interesting blog post by author Al Giordano

who removed the text from all of his HuffPo articles.
This was a much more news-y exchange, but given that we are all friends with the same person, we are still much more likely to be similar-minded than people who are commenting on a story on a news site.