visnum

UPDATE: Engelliweb commented: blogger.com was banned according to the order of Diyarbakır 1. Peace & Crime Court, 20.10.2008 of 2008/2761.

I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: (see above update) There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

Many bloggers pay great attention to the amount of comments they receive, in fact more than necessary. I have seen many novice bloggers who are upset just because of the scarcity of comments they receive under their posts. On the other hand, very successful bloggers like Steve Pavlina are not interested in comments at all.

We also see many, many successful bloggers like Robert Scoble or like Dooce.com, where comments reach at hundreds. For people who see the amount of comments would think that as a criteria of successful blogging. When they think like that, they would see only a little or no comments as an indicator of failure.

But it is not. Comment amount is not an indicator of your success. If you ask questions on your blog post and nobody comes up with an answer, then you may conclude that nobody cares but apart from such exceptions, it really doesn’t matter whether people comment on your blog or not. Recently, I met a couple of new readers from Facebook and they told me how helpful my posts on moodr are. Most of them pointed to one or two posts to be most successful and helpful. Those posts didn’t received any comments. Yet, people were very satisfied with them.

When a blog goes popular, other bloggers just go and comment there in order to gain visibility for themselves. When Darren posts something new or Tina posts something new, most of the time, people are there to comment for their own visibility. I don’t mean that all of those comments are not useful. There are very useful conversations on many blogs through commenting for all of us to benefit. I just try to add to my argument that amount of comments on a blog post is not an indicator of that post’s success.

So, bloggers usually expect affection in the name of comments and that’s pretty understandable. They put great effort in a post and tens of comments under that post is an instant gratification for many of them. However, know that this is not a criteria and don’t get upset when you don’t see any comments. Look at your statistics instead. How many people read that post, and what is the bounce rate of this post? If the bounce rate is low then you can surely conclude that your post has been successful.

The same is valid for pingbacks and trackbacks but not as much as comments. For backlinks, gaining visibility is again a primary motivation for linking. Don’t get upset by that either. But they are more important than comments because they built long term traffic into your blog. The only way you can get them is the usefulness of your post.