Some readers might remember my dismay over what I felt was a frivolous lawsuit: a complaint against the site eHarmony for not offering same sex dating services at their website.

In a court ruling where eHarmony has admitted doing no wrong, it has agreeed to start — yep, you guessed it — a same sex website.

It’s not going to be at eHarmony though (puzzling to say the least) which means the courts didn’t do anything except force eHarmony to start a niche site for same sex partners and give someone $$$ for crying foul.

The new same sex site eHarmony is creating is available at compatiblepartners.net. Now let’s see what the guy who complained, Eric McKinley, says about eHarmony (emphasis mine):

McKinley, 46, said he was shocked when he tried to sign up for the dating site but couldn’t get past the first screen because there was no option for men seeking men.

"It’s very frustrating and it’s very humiliating to think that other people can do it and I can’t," he said. "And the only reason I can’t is because I’m a gay man. That’s very hurtful."

Did he just use the word ‘humilating’ to describe a website that didn’t cater to him? Seriously? I can’t believe Mr. McKinley didn’t just use his browser of choice and choose a different website. Why did he feel it was important to force eHarmony to create a separate niche site so he could find other men to date?

This is not a gay vs. straight issue

Just so I’m not misunderstood, this is not a gay vs. straight issue. I have no problem with gay people being able to find dates online. No problem with bisexual people dating men and women. This isn’t about sexual preference at all to me. This is about a business online that has chosen to only cater to hetero dating being forced to create a site for same sex couples.

I can’t believe the court didn’t just throw this out. It’s not discrimination. Discrimination would be telling gays and lesbians that they can’t use the site to search for the other sex to date. eHarmony did no such thing, did they? Or did I miss that?

At the end of the day all this lawsuit did was give publicity to eHarmony to start a niche site that caters to same sex couples, joining a sea of others that already offer the service online. Mr. McKinley and Ms. Carlson who I wrote about originally could have found plenty of dates at other online dating sites. They were no more discriminated against than I would be if I want to exchange science fiction books at some website that only allows exchanging romance.

Outrageous. The courts got this one wrong. Agree/disagree?

The Xbox 2008 fall update is now available and provides a number of new features including the New Xbox Experience (NXE) which is a complete redesign of the blade. I was glad to see it didn’t include some nonsensical virtual world that didn’t add anything worthwhile to the experience.

After the update which only takes a few short minutes to patch, you start by creating your own avatar, mine pictured below:

The process of creating an avatar involves choosing a model to begin with from a group and then customizing. It’s all point and click and a snap to do. This avatar is used in only three arcade games and doesn’t seem as central to the interface as Miis are on the Nintendo Wii.

After creating your avatar, you will immediately notice that windows for items now scroll from the right to left. It takes a few minutes to get used to, but seems to work alright. I need more time playing around with and getting used to it before I say if I like it better than the old dashboard.

Netflix streaming from thousands of titles

I briefly checked out the Netflix option. Since I don’t have an active Netflix subscription, I’m not on board with this yet, but likely will be trying this out very soon. We’re still wading our way through the $200 worth of movies that came with our Vudu. You can subscribe to Netflix through the Xbox, so no need to go to your computer. Handy.

obessable points out there are a couple gotchas making not all of the reported 12,000+ titles available:

Sony owned Columbia Pictures movies studio won’t license movies for playback on Xbox, and other movies face similar licensing restrictions.

Sony not on board with the Xbox? Makes sense. I wonder if/when this will change should the PS3 get similar functionality someday?

More descriptions of game features including resolution

Like that you can now tell what games are in 1080p (answer: not many). Wolf of the Battlefield Commando 3, Feeding Frenzy 2 and Portal are all 1080p and have been added to the Hmm Xbox 360 1080p games list.

Also, not every game has complete information. I went through 178 Xbox Arcade titles and found a dozen or so that didn’t have resolution information.

Xbox Live Parties

You can connect with other Xbox Live users in a party and then play games together without having to go through the old invite one at a time route.

Access to XNA Community created peer reviewed games

Games that pass peer review created with the XNA Developer studio can publish their games to the Xbox Live world at large. This is an immediate audience of millions of gamers.  A barrier still exists for you to be able to share something you created with me and vice versa regardless of peer review results, but hey, maybe we’ll get that in a future update.

Hey Dorothy, er Sony, when will we ever be able to see Home?

As a PS3 owner, I continue to wait, somewhat impatiently at this point, to see Home. I’d love to write about how cool this is — or isn’t, but I’m not worthy yet. And neither is anybody I know on the PS3. I fear that Home is going to go down like Spore did earlier this year: one gigantic disappointment.

But I’m holding out hope that Sony does something cool. If they add some of the goodies that Microsoft added in this update, I’ll be stoked.

Close the Ted Stevens drama curtains, he’s out. The Alaska recount wasn’t leaning his way and he said Uncle:

The end was not what Mr. Stevens would have scripted – a defeat just weeks after his conviction in federal court on ethics charges. The final votes were counted Tuesday, his 85th birthday, and the news came after his colleagues considered but postponed a vote on banishing him from the Republican ranks. Together, the developments represented a dismal finale for a man who had handled untold billions in federal dollars, helped create the modern military through his funding decisions and shaped his very state.

During Steven’s final speech to the Senate on CNN this morning he shared his guiding quote: "To hell with politics, just do what’s right for Alaska." Stepping down sooner — like when he was convicted –  would have been doing the right thing for Alaska, but hey it worked out the way it should have and those yellow-bellied senators who wouldn’t cast a vote on a convicted felon get off easy.

As the picture shows in this post, they applauded Stevens at the end of his speech. After 40 years of service, I’m sure he deserved it, but all I know about the guy as a non-Alaskan is he seemed to spit in the face of the court’s decision. Had a hard time respecting someone who couldn’t vote in elections in a lot of states imagining he might have been able to vote on laws impacting me. Shoulda, woulda, coulda — it doesn’t matter now.

Alaskans got it right

We also don’t have to worry about Sarah Palin possibly naming herself to an open Senate seat either. The Democrats now have 58 seats with Minnesota and Georgia still in recount stage. They could get to the magic 60-vote threshold.

A friend of mine is concerned about the lack of a balance of power this time around. Look around, the country is a mess right now, no thanks to the Bush years. It’s time for some change and my attitude is let’s see what happens with fewer roadblocks. It could get worse, I’m willing to accept that risk, but having government battle it out while things continue to be unstable in the economy seems a worse path to take.

Submitted for your approval, the Savannah College of Art and Design (aka SKAD) along with Walker & Company are working on 8 graphic novels from the Twilight Zone!!! (just had to go exclamation crazy on this one)

They will be adapting these stories from the original Rod Serling scripts and releasing the first two in Fall 2008: "Walking Distance" and "The After Hours." My favorite Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man" will not be in the lineup, but can be seen on CBS. This one wasn’t penned by Serling but the timing of the ending is classic Twilight Zone twist.

Thanks to natashawescoat for the post alerting me to this. The only thing her post was missing was a link. Went to SCAD, typed "Twilight Zone" into the query and the story was the topmost link.

Rod Serling’s widow, Carol, had this to say about the graphic novels:

"I suspect that my husband, Rod Serling, the ‘father’ of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ would wholeheartedly approve of this ‘new dimension’ of his stories. The adaptations and fine graphic pictures have truly caught the feeling and climate of that wondrous world of imagination,"

Where these books can be bought — not in … The Twilight Zone 

Walker Books for Young Readers (walkeryoungreaders.com) is making them and they will be for sale through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Waldenbooks as well as a bunch of independent booksellers.

Here are links for the Amazon listings I found along with the price as of this writing (very subject to change) and the release date, where applicable:

Twilight Zone: The After Hours ($13.25, available now)
Twilight Zone: The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street ($9.99, to be released December 23, 2008)
Twilight Zone: The Odyssey Of Flight 33 ($11.55, to be released December 23, 2008)

One of these days being it is my favorite show ever on TV I should do some sort of episodic tribute here at Hmm to The Twilight Zone. Perhaps go season by season, favorite episode by episode through the list. If you have never seen an episode of the original Twilight Zone series than put at least one of the definitive season DVDs for the first three seasons (when it was best) on your holiday shopping list. Season four and five were still good, but the first three seasons were incredible.

These graphic novels are not the only adaptions created. There are some audio dramas out there that were playing on Sirius at one time and also available via Amazon on CD. I caught parts of a few of these radio dramas when I had Sirius (don’t any more) and they seemed pretty well done. I need to buy one of these radio drama packages and give them a thorough Hmm review.

Who would have thought the biggest import car lots in 2008 would be the ports? Import cars stuck at the port with nowhere to go. The screencap from CNN below is like a daylight graveyard.

With the current state of the economy, it’s no surprise people aren’t buying new cars. The car you’re already driving can probably make it another year or two. Buying a new car is usually a luxury purchase versus buying a good used car, unless you can find a really good deal like we did last year. In times like these, luxury purchases are ill-advised.

Here’s a radical thought instead of bailing out the big three automakers, maybe it’s time to send some/most/all of these imports back and for americans to buy primarily American made cars?

Fox News:

What we do know is that, without a bailout, GM will in all likelihood head in to Chapter 11. As with many other large companies before them, that entails restructuring and an actual hardnosed effort to return the company to profitability by making hard choices and changes. Easy? Painless? Absolutely not and no one should underestimate that.

We’re at the turn-in phase for our 4-year lease with our Saturn Relay. Most likely we’ll be paying the $400 drop-off fee and moving quickly for the exit, but if some insanely good deal is thrown our direction we’ll stop and listen. Adding into this round of buying criteria will be: is it American made.

Question for American readers, for your next car will you buy an American-made car? If not, why not?

Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you’ve probably heard something about UFOs, aliens and Roswell at least once in your lifetime. The year was 1947, some 21 years before I entered this earth and would not hear about Roswell for a good 10 more years or so.

The facts 

In years since I knew something happened, there was some kind of crash, on a farm Northwest of Roswell. A rancher by the name of "Mac" Brazel stumbled upon the wreckage and was worried about having it on his property because his sheep would not cross past it.

He gathered samples and took them into town to the sheriff. His story in the beginning was that he didn’t know what the material was and took it into town, wondering if it might be the wreckage of a flying saucer.

The sheriff phoned the local 509th bomber group and was routed to military intelligence officer Jesse Marcel Sr. who went out to the sheriff’s office to review the strange material. Marcel wanted to see where it came from and Brazel led him out to the spot where the wreckage was on his property.

Marcel took more samples of the material in his car. He stopped home and after swearing them to secrecy, showed his wife and his son what was discovered. He told his son — according to his son, Jesse Marcel Jr. — that it wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before. They touched the material which was like aluminum foil, only lighter and without one side being paper-like. They handled it carefully, not wanting to damage it.

Marcel took the material back to the base and after showing his superior, General Ramsey, the general checked  around with other military bases to see if it might be part of an experiment, a sensational press release was made that was retracted later. What was described as debris from a flying saucer was quickly amended to a misunderstanding: it was just a weather balloon.

This is where the story twists, depending on who or what you want — or are willing — to believe.

Common sense and Hollywood

It’s important to note that neither Marcel or son has ever claimed to have seen any aliens. They both only claimed to have seen material they hadn’t ever seen before. I was unclear on this until I read Marcel Jr.’s book, The Roswell Legacy, pictured above. This is the only book I’ve ever read on the subject, but I believe almost everything happened as Marcel’s son described.

The book isn’t laid out in story format. Instead it’s told in first person with little narrative and mostly descriptions of what Marcel’s son had witnessed firsthand and/or been told by his father of what really happened in 1947. It isn’t filled with a bunch of grandiose hypothesis about what might have happened, as I’ve seen to be the case with the Roswell incident over the years. It’s a mere 174 pages, including appendix.

The book also goes into a little bit of who his father was, his military credentials and what happened to him after Roswell. There was a TV movie in 1994 called Roswell starring Martin Sheen which takes some poetic license with the story, but remains somewhat faithful to what Marcel Jr. says really happened to him.

There are other stories portrayed in that TV movie which get much more difficult to believe — like there was a second crash site Marcel didn’t see that had the aliens, one of which was still alive. Don’t get derailed there though yet, let’s stay with Marcel who only said he saw material not of this world, later rebuffed by the government to be common material he should have been able to identify.

Marcel Jr. a surgeon has also been a career military man like his father and the only reasons he claims (and I believe) he wrote this story were:

1. to keep a promise to his father over getting the truth out about what really happened in 1947
2. to defend his father’s honor that was besmirched over mis-indentifying the Roswell crash debris as something other worldly instead of a weather balloon.

Marcel Jr. has served in Iraq as recently as 2005. He a credible source to me.

Marcel being part of the elite 509th bomber group, the unit behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been able to easily identify the wreckage if it came from some known material. That only makes sense. Especially if it was a weather balloon, which was the government’s official story shortly after the first report put out by the 509th.

A weather balloon.  They’ve stuck by that story for the most part. Amending it later after reopening the investigation to a mogul balloon.

In the book, Marcel Jr. provides a scan of his father’s diploma from radar school dated September 8, 1945. He also lists his various military awards and despite his alleged gaffe identifying the debris, he was later promoted to lieutenant colonel in the reserves.

This doesn’t sound like the type of guy who would go out to a local ranch, bring back some material, show his boss the general the material, and then be part of putting out a press release that said it could be from a "flying saucer."

I did some internet fact checking to see if a copy of the original press release could be found online. Wikipedia, in fact, has a scan of the story in the Roswell Daily Record dated Tuesday July 8, 1943

 
Source: Wikipedia

So was there really a UFO crash in 1947 or not?

At least for this post I’m going to steer away from the hard to believe claims about seeing actual aliens at the second site, that one of them might have been kept alive for five years. Or that the government actually had an exchange program called Project Serpo from 1965-1978 where military personnel visited the planet Zeta Reticuli (and later allegedly died from "excess radiation"). You can visit YouTube, type in "Roswell" as the query and be treated to a bunch of clearly fake alien autopsy videos or use your favorite search engine for any of these terms to learn more if so inclined.

(But hey, if you want a good laugh then check out Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs — lol! Don’t you dig it when people try to be serious and it’s funny instead?)

Mea culpa: I wrote back in August 2006 that I believe aliens have visited earth and that the U.S government has proof of it. I’m not sure if this first happening was Roswell in 1947 and the book being reviewed here doesn’t try to answer that (and if it does, then it fails to be very compelling in that regard). What it does try to answer was if there was a crash of something not from earth. If you can’t go as far as me and believe in E.T then at least see if you can go as far as believing something crashed here not of this earth.

I am ready to believe the wreckage Marcel and his son touched wasn’t from earth. There are simply too many holes in the government’s response to believe otherwise. Weather balloon? Come on.

Where it came from, I don’t know, but if we knew it came from somewhere on earth what would be the harm in the government declassifying this information 60+ years later? Since the declassification hasn’t happened, one of the following possibilities must be true (pick your poison):

1. the government knows where it came from and doesn’t want to tell us
2. the government does not know where it came from and doesn’t want to admit this to us
3. the government knows where it came from on earth, and doesn’t want to tell us
4. the government does not know where it came from on earth and doesn’t want to admit this to us (yeah, similar to #2)

I was glad to be able to solve the lingering riddle in my mind about what happened in 1947 just outside Roswell. For that reason I give this book the highest Hmm Reviews grade possible. The book doesn’t get all "tinfoil-hat" to use the author’s own description of the fringe UFO crowd — and don’t worry readers, I’m not joining that crowd either. In fact, until the last chapter it doesn’t get too far afield of what the author and his father witnessed. That type of non-fiction works great for me.

In the last chapter the author explains why he thinks we’re not alone in the universe. I agree with much of his thinking there too. We can’t be alone and it’s arrogant to think we are. The universe is much too big and there are too many parts we know absolutely nothing about.

He thinks the aliens that have contacted us have been benign and that they might have some Star Trek like prime directive. That would make some sense as to why we don’t see aliens everywhere but they might have been in contact with the government.

The Russians have acknowledged crashed debris as being not of this earth while the U.S government has done so to date. I think before my death, assuming living out a ripe old age, I’ll see this happen.

I think it’s well past time for the government to declassify the material in 1947 that’s sitting on a base somewhere, waiting for further critical study and research. Why not?

Conspiracy theorist or realist

Now if I’m to be labeled conspiracy theorist for believing the government has botched up the Roswell cover-up, so be it. I put this one with the JFK assassination as far as believing the government lied to us. I’d also add in the more recent Bush administration lying about the whole weapons of mass destructions.

I think it’s harder to believe that the government has never lied to us, don’t you?

Conspiracy theorist or realist? I’ll take the latter. If you are looking for a story about what really happened in 1947 in Roswell, run, don’t walk, to the bookstore and get The Roswell Legacy. It feels about as close to the truth as we can get until the government declassifies what they are secreting away from us for our own [snicker] protection. Grade: A+

This morning when I learned that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is being charged by the SEC for insider trading that allegedly occurred on June 28, 2004. The complaint involves his selling of his 6% stake in mamma.com. The first thing I thought was: wonder what Mark was blogging about around this time?  What did he write specifically, if anything, about Mamma.com?

For those not familiar, Mr. Cuban blogs somewhat regularly and passionately at BlogMaverick.com and on June 28, 2004 at 9:13am he wrote a post titled "Mishegaas…again" offering a rant against a Tribune news writer:

If they [Tribune Company] only knew how many times I have told brokers and possible investors that they shouldn’t buy Trib stock because if they can’t get simple details on their sports pages right, how can you trust their accountants? Corporate culture either values accuracy or it doesn’t. The Tribune Company obviously doesn’t.

This might invoke a ‘who cares’ response, but a search through his blog reveals he had written specifically about Mamma.com. Let’s rewind the tape to Cuban’s post "Today was a very good day" on March 17, 2004 which is the first time he mentioned mamma.com on his blog:

To start things off, the SEC filing for my purchase of shares in Mamma.com hit the tape. Everyone wanted to know why. Why this stock. Particularly when I usually am opposed to investing in any non dividend paying stocks at all.

… I invested in mamma.com for the same reason I invested in Netidentity.com back when it was known as mailbank.com. I love businesses with low overhead, that don’t need to be technology leaders to succeed, that generate cash that they can put in the bank, and at some point, hopefully payout to shareholders. I think mamma.com has that potential.

This was some three months before he sold the Mamma stock.

Fast forward approximately nine months after selling Mamma.com to March 2, 2005 when Cuban blogged about "Naked Shorts … What I have learned" and provides specific detail why he sold the Mamma stock:

I wanted to reference Mamma.com. I had purchased stock in Mamma.com in hope that it could be an up and coming search engine. I thought I had done some level of due diligence. Talked to the company management. Talked to some employees who worked in sales. Read the SEC Filings.

… Then the company did a PIPE financing. Im not going to discuss the good or bad of PIPE financing other than to say that to me its a huge red flag and I dont want to own stock in companies that use this method of financing. Why? Because I dont like the idea of selling in a private placement, stock for less than the market price, and then to make matters worse, pushing the price lower with the issuance of warrants. So I sold the stock.

Through Cuban’s blog, we get a curious glimpse of what he was thinking at the time. Will be interesting to see what happens. I’m kind of surprised that none of the mainstream news reports of the incident mention Cuban’s blog posts around the time.

Wired does point out that Cuban is a majority partner in the site sharesleuth.com which is an independent web-based site that exposes securities fraud. D’oh. 

Innocent until proven guilty

It’s important to keep in mind that these are only charges by the SEC (read full PDF here) at this time, Mr. Cuban has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing yet. 

As we allege in the complaint, Mamma.com entrusted Mr. Cuban with nonpublic information after he promised to keep the information confidential. Less than four hours later, Mr. Cuban betrayed that trust by placing an order to sell all of his shares. It is fundamentally unfair for someone to use access to nonpublic information to improperly gain an edge on the market.

If Cuban is found guilty, then he’ll join Martha Stewart who used information gleaned privately for financial gain. Stewart did jail time. Would Cuban face jail time too? This is serious business. The $750,000 Cuban saved by selling before the stock price plummeted allegedly with insider knowledge would not be worth the risk.

When it comes to tech support, online still isn’t used as much as one might think. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study was conducted on the percentage of users of computers, music players, cellphones, smart phones and internet service found only 2% solve their own technology problems online. The rest?

About 38% of respondents called customer service, 28% fixed the problem themselves and 15% got help from friends or relatives.  The rest — about 15% — gave up.

If this study is accurate, would it be a great time to start a local tech help service?  Although this study doesn’t say how many got help from a third party tech support service, I’m curious how many factored that into the nearly 40% who call customer service? Don’t know how it is for most the folks reading, but I’ve long been on the receiving end of the 15% who friends and relatives go to for tech help.

I try to fix my own problems using the information online, but will sometimes call customer service if it’s something that well placed search engine queries don’t resolve. I’m not a fan of knowledge bases online, which often seem like the customer service equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack. I’ve found on several occasions that the built-in support search engines are lacking compared to targeted search engine queries.

I’m also not shy about using Live Chat help functions on sites, but find it frustrating when I’m sent to somebody using a script instead of common sense. It’s not a problem to have a script funnel into fixes for problems, but listen to what the customer has tried before diving in and backtracking. Scripted help reps too often in my experience don’t listen and will incorrectly diagnose what you’ve already tried and hasn’t worked.

Where do you fit in this study? Are you one of the 2% who try to fix the problems online? I’m pretty sure most readers of this blog will not be in the 15% who give up.

Update 3:31pm PST Download Hmmcast #183 (mp3) Running Time: 01:01:17

Hmmcast #183 live Friday November 14, 2008 2pm PST / 5pm EST / 10pm GMT
Streaming audio: 66.154.0.129:8200

Topics for Hmmcast #183

• October worst month for U.S retail — ever (2.8% decline):
  

  the October decline in retail sales was broad-based: 2.5 percent in furniture, 2.3 percent in electronics goods, and 1.4 percent in clothing.

• First female 4-star General named Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody:
  

  Women now make up about 14 percent of the active-duty Army and are allowed to serve in a wide variety of assignments. They are still excluded from units designed primarily to engage in direct combat, such as infantry and tank units, but their opportunities have expanded over the past two decades

• [site news] block ratings replaced by stars and moved to bottom of each post. Almost 2,000 ratings have been received since adding to site.
• Hmm posts since last show review including: the strangest terrestrial casino design I’ve ever seen, Obama dog and condoms, VUDU on demand DVD / HD box
• *Featuring live original music by tabites: “Don’t Break The Chain (Unplugged)” and “Trip 9/11″ (semi-unplugged)
• *Live call-ins welcome: 253-843-6283 / Skype TDavid
• *Live chat at irc.scriptschool.com #scriptschool and in Mogulus

Hmm.

There are Wordpress plugins out there that will display who has left the most comments at your WordPress powered blog, but what if you want to query this directly from the MySQL database? Here are the queries required to do that.

Show top 10 commenters at your blog with URL and email address

Note that Lestat and ^Lestat are the same person. This query comes in handy to see users that have changed their names to leave different comments. Sterling has done this too, adding "chip" between his name in 16 comments, giving him a grand total of 619 comments.

As of this morning’s query this blog has 13,162 approved comments. You can find this number inside the WordPress admin dashboard area, but if you want to query it, use the following:

For reference:

1 = comment approved
0 = comment pending
spam = comment marked as spam

A past Hmm post shows the query necessary to delete spam comments from a WordPress database.

How many comments have I made as of this writing? 1,976 (15%). I’d be curious from a percentage basis seeing how that compares to other bloggers. Feel free to provide your own percentage stats in the comments or trackback.

I’m going to make an extra effort to get these top commenters on future Hmmcast Live shows. Since they aren’t textually shy, maybe the same will apply to audio versions.

Show top 10 commenters for year at your blog

What if you wanted to find out who the top commenters were by year? Here’s the query to do that:

Just replace 2008 with the year you want to check.  I ran this for years 2003-2007 as well as 2008 to date. If you’d like to see how many comments were made by year, use the following query:

It’s interesting to note the numbers of comments received by year as this blog has grown.

2003 - total comments made: 93

2004 - total comments made: 561 (+503%)

2005 - total comments made: 2405 (+329%)

2006 - total comments made: 4,940 (+105%)

2007 - total comments made: 3,642 (-26%)

2008 - total comments made through November 14, 2008: 1,517

Notes:

• the peak for most comments received in the year to this blog was in 2006 and has fallen off noticeably since. I’m sure there are many bloggers who would love to have over 100 comments left a month so believe me I’m not complaining. But for the curious, why has this happened? Are blogs dying as some are suggesting? Or is commenting on blogs themselves dying? I don’t think so. Sure, traffic is down a bit here for the year, but not to the degree of the number of comments dropping off.
• There are tons of places these days to comment externally like Twitter, FriendFeed. I predict this trend of leaving comments elsewhere will level off somewhat and we’ll see return to commenting at blogs directly. Perhaps this won’t rebound in 2009, but I don’t see things deteriorating much further.
• There remain good reasons to leave comments at blogs, particularly for bloggers wanting other bloggers to follow blog comments to signature URLs. I’m sure there are a good number of readers who don’t use these microblogging tools, nor care to.
• In the post dated July 23, 2007 I noted that commenting activity had "increased dramatically" over the last year — statistically, at least from a calendar year basis this appears inaccurate. I’m not sure from reading that post what queries I was using to come to that conclusion, but the numbers above don’t lie.

How is commenting activity going at your blog?

Questions for bloggers: have you seen a similar drop-off? What kinds of things are you doing to invite more comments left on your blog?

Questions for non-bloggers: why aren’t you leaving as many comments on blogs as in year’s past? Or are you leaving more? More directly, what would make you more likely to leave more comments on this blog?