Over the last year or so, Kev and I have migrated from watching films on DVD to buying box sets of TV series and watching all the things we should have watched but had a life at the time.. 
- Cover of My Name Is Earl – The Album
I’ll admit to loving Frasier, it works on so many levels and don’t you just want to take Niles home and smother, I mean mother him? 
Another of my personal faves is ‘My name is Earl‘.
I was pretty gutted to see a campaign on twitter earlier this year to prevent the 4th series being the last series of Earl and I even blogged and tweeted a few times about it myself. Alas, the social media campaign that saved ‘Chuck’ failed to save Earl and that is a real shame.
Watching season 4 I just watched the episode where Darnell joins Joy to ‘Buddybook’ where she can make friends, but no one in Camden county wants to ‘friend’ her as she is mean to them. She becomes quite frustrated and angry about the fact she has no online friends and resorts to asking the kids at Space Academy if they are on buddybook…
Does that work in real life? Do you not ‘friend’ people on Facebook and other sites? Or do you ‘friend’ everyone? Do you worry about ‘friending’ troublemakers – what might people think if they looked down who you were following on twitter or who your friends were on Facebook?
Darnell is everyone’s friend, with over 300 friends online and everyone knows him offline too. Is he just more sociable?
One social networking website has been known to ban people from using it if you are part whom it deems to be the ‘wrong’ crowd. They would probably ban Joy.
Is this what social networking is about? Networking is about engaging and building relations and you can’t do that based on another persons perception of someone else. Or can you?
What advice would you give someone in Joy’s situation? Do you check who someone else follows? Does it make a difference to your relationship with them?
Sarah
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Oct 29 2009
Adding Value to your commenters on your blog
I am always looking at ways of adding value to my blogs. From welcoming visitors to encouraging comments, (as well as interesting content) I look at ways to engage with the blogs readership and make it a worthwhile experience for all involved.
One way you can do this is through plugins - if you have a Wordpress self hosted site. If you don’t have one, then drop me a line and i’ll introduce you to Barbara Saul, the Blog Mistress and you can take it from there. Creative use of plugins can make your blog inviting and non threatening, a small community in it’s own right, so what ones are good for your blog?
How do you engage with some of the comment authors on blogs you visit? For example you are reading a blog post and one of the commenter’s is witty and helpful, you find them interesting but where do you go from there? You click through and find their blog or website but are hesitant about getting in touch as it all seems just a fraction too stalkerish
I have just discovered Twitterlink comments. This adds a little field to the comment box where the commenter can add their Twitter ID.
You can follow them and continue to get to know them on twitter as well as through blogs. As the relationship and conversation grows they may follow back to your blog and get to know you, and comment there. Less stalkery more relationship building
You can download it from here http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/twitterlink-comments.zip
Try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below and tell me what other plugins you recommend.
Sarah
Tags: adding value to blogs, blog commenting, comments on blogs, Plug-in, Social Networking, Twitter, Website, wordpress plugins
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