If a writer blogs in the blogosphere and nobody responds, has she really blogged? Okay, not a perfect echo of the famous philosophical question regarding trees falling in forests, unheard, but a valiant attempt still.

It's one thing when my kids ignore me; it's another when my thought-provoking, highly stimulating, carefully formulated blog posts go...uncommented by others!  And this is despite my concerted and calculated effort to end nearly every post with an open-ended QUESTION!

And I KNOW you are out there, you insipient blog-readers, because I, unbeknownst to you, have a site stats meter that measures visits and shows me that on days I post new blogs, my stats spike! Ah hah! How clever; your respect for my powers of deduction has, no doubt, soared as high as my stats will when this post is published!

So I've done a little thinking and poking around--y'know, the dirt-digging journalists are best at, and I've come up with a little theory, called, I've given it away up top, the Theory of Cross Bloggination. It goes something like this: I'll comment on YOUR blog if YOU comment on MY blog. Sounds a little five-year-oldish to my ears, but etiquette is etiquette and protocol is protocol and I've heard a lot worse in other areas. Now, of course, I may be off, but then again, I may be dead on. I've gone snooping around other blogs and it seems that there's this unspoken rule of one blog washing the other.

Thing is, I'm overworked, underpaid, and totally not interested in poking around other blogs in the hopes of coaxing would-be commenters to come out of their cozy little closets long enough to leave some half-baked opinon on what I've written about.

So why am I dwelling on the lack of comments, practically pleading for signs of human life?

Here's a big admission. I think, I really do, that the primary reason I want comments is not because it looks good on  the site, but rather because I'm actually INTERESTED in what my readers think. Whoa--heavy, huh! I think it would not be too strong a phrase to say I really VALUE diverse and intelligent opinions; they help shape my worldview and enrich me and, hopefully, others.

So please, I ask you to dare to break protocol and boldly reach out your hand for that handy little "Add Comment" button. Take a deep breath and...enlighten me!

I'm not promising, but if you do leave something valuable, I may be induced to drag myself over to your blog and leave a half-baked comment in return :-).

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