Fav.or.it, which is attempting to bring RSS to the masses, has recently been under fire from people like Duncan Riley of the Inquisitr and Mark Hopkins of Mashable for essentially republishing full feeds of blogs, with integrated comments, alongside advertising.While I'll leave that fight to them at this point, one interesting byproduct of Fav.or.it's importing of blogs, and their comments, is the ability to spot trends across more than 2,000 feeds, including how often people post comments, what days are most frequent, how often brands are mentioned, and whether the biggest blogs have frequent commentors, or a wide distribution.
An initial post by Nick Halstead, titled "Blogosphere Commenting Statistics", shows an average of 13,000 comments per day coming into the system, and unsurprisingly, that number dives down to just over half on the weekends. And while he only offers three examples: TechCrunch, Mashable and ChrisBrogan.com, it looks like the more intimate feel and participation of Chris leads to a higher level of repeat commenters than do the blog networks.The discussion around whether RSS readers like Google Reader, Shyftr, and now, Fav.or.it, should include full feeds, include comments, or show ads, has been among the most controversial topics this year in the blogosphere. I believe that at the very least, these systems should make best efforts to push out comments from their system, and that Fav.or.it is actually doing the reverse, pulling in external comments to their system, is at least eyebrow-raising. But while they're doing it, Nick and team have their hands on some very interesting statistics that have got to have Yuvi Panda of The Statbot salivating. Let's see if we end up hearing more from this pool of data.