What's Your Post to Comment/Trackback Ratio?
Awhile ago, (Before Stowe started begging for links to his new blog. Click that. It's too funny.) I posted about my blog to comment ratio. It was 0.9. — Now, it is: — Posts: 1694 | Comments: 2245 | TrackBacks: 339
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a metrics post from pc4media: an update of its own earlier blog-to-comment ratio (0.9 then, now 1,694 posts against 2,245 comments and 339 TrackBacks), inviting other bloggers to report theirs. The idea traveled fast — Don Dodge picked up the same metric the same day as 'The Conversational Index for blogs,' which turns a vanity stat into a named yardstick.
It lands in a week already fixated on measuring conversation: the same day, the Microsoft Geek Blogger pushed for tracking your comments no matter where you make them, and Stowe's confirmed launch of a new blog with open solicitation of links shows how much of blogger standing still rests on inbound attention.
First-order effects
- pc4media's own numbers give the metric its proof of concept — comments plus TrackBacks now exceed posts roughly 1.5-to-1 — so readers benchmarking themselves have a worked example, not just a formula.
- Don Dodge's same-day 'Conversational Index' framing gives the ratio a label other bloggers can adopt, converting a personal stat into a shared scorecard.
Second-order effects
- If bloggers adopt the ratio, toolmakers face demand for exactly what the same-week comment-tracking push describes: aggregating a person's comments scattered across other people's blogs into one countable place.
- Link-soliciting behavior like Stowe's gets a new justification — a comment on someone else's blog now feeds your conversational score, not just theirs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, blog standing shifts from raw link counts toward dialogue volume — posts-to-responses — pushing blog platforms to surface comment and TrackBack data as first-class stats rather than side effects.
- A standard conversational metric would also pressure aggregators and search services to rank or profile blogs by engagement rather than inbound links alone, though whether the fragmented blog ecosystem converges on any single number is genuinely unsettled.
The trend: Blogging is moving from publish-and-count-links toward conversation-as-measurement, with ratios like this one and cross-site comment tracking as early instruments.