Love Our Lurkers Day!

Let me start off by saying hello and thank you to all my readers out there. Today is the day I, and many other bloggers thanks to Bonnie over at MBS (if you haven't been to her blog I encourage you to pay her a visit), invite those silent readers out there to open up and leave a comment. I know, I know, it's not all that simple.

Most of us start out as lurkers for good reasons. We wander around from blog to website to blog and back again, soaking up the things we like and trying to steer clear of the things we don't. The cookies from all those sites are frightening enough, thinking about some computer or worse an actual person, tracking our page loads, knowing what we've read and who knows what other kinds of information. Leaving our name or email address attached to a comment is just a step too far with all that other stuff out there.

Okay, maybe you aren't quite so worried (or paranoid) but leaving comments is far from easy. I mean you have to find the link to leave the comment and sometimes it's hard to see it at the bottom of the posts with the print getting so small and all that. Then there remains the various methods Blogger has for inputting comments, on my page it open up a separate small window, but on other pages it can be embedded beneath the post or load another page specially designed for comments. All of these can cause problems with protective software on our computers like pop-up blockers and such. Definitely a pain in the butt (and not the kind any of us are into) to get passed and then comes the part of leaving the message.

There are so many options, like signing in with a google id or Openid or Name/URL or Anonymous. What do you choose? It's really up to you of course but the anonymous option and Name/URL are a couple of really nice and easy options. You see with anonymous you don't have leave any information that leads personally back to you, your comment is completely untraceable and with the Name/URL, the URL is optional so you can just put in your internet name (The fake id we call ourselves in cyberspace) and then you can be generically connected to your comment without actually signing in with a user account that might track preferences and things. Then there is the crazy word verification stuff (I turned it off on my blog because it just plain annoys me too) and sometimes those words are nothing but random letters that have no right to be strewn together and reading them can be impossible without a zoom in close-up. Last, but certainly not least is the hassle of coming up with something to say to the blogger that actually has merit and context within the subject matter of the blog. It's not easy! It's not really hard either and a little bit of practice will make it as simple as 1,2,3.

The truth is, almost every blogger lives to hear from their readers. Whether you leave a simple hello, an encouraging few words of appreciation or a detailed review of the writing and subject matter, your time and comment matter a lot to the blogger. You don't have to be William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or Stephen King, to say something a blogger will appreciate, just knowing you are out there and reading what we write is enough.

Take a little time today, tomorrow, or whenever you feel comfortable and say hello on the blogs you enjoy reading. I know I would love to hear from you and I think most of the other bloggers out there would feel the same.

Don't forget to read today's regularly scheduled post, Thawing Out: The Prism Effect