How precious to a blogger are her friends and fellow bloggers who actually take a minute every now and then to read what she wrote.  And then leave comments to let her know they did.

First, a warm shout out to my friend at  I Feel Unusual, who is a lovely and funny writer as well as a kind and generous reader-and-comment leaver. 

Erin, aka Lucky Broadway Girl is an actress and sometime-spelunker who lives and blogs(and wears cool costumes!)  in New York City.

Jennifer at Career Search and More has many wise words to share, and has also promised to let me interview her later on this blog — stay tuned!

Life With Dogs and Flooded Lizard Kingdom are two delightful blogs I’ve only recently started reading and they both go well with a cup of coffee and, um, chocolate if you’ve got it.

Go visit these folks today, and tell them Almostgotit sent ya!

 A. NO, no, and no: none of the above, silly people. 

If you will all join me back here in the real world, please:

Bloggers want more readers (and more comments,) of course.

One of the best ways to increase reader participation (=comments) is to give readers something juicy in return. 

DISQUS (pronounced “discuss”) is a blog plug-in that encourages readers to leave comments by awarding them with much more exposure of their own.  Readers who comment on DISQUS-enabled blogs can track and archive their own comments all in one place, where they can also edit or even republish them.  Moreover, a reader’s DISQUS profile “follows” him or her from blog to blog, allowing other readers to click through to see his or her other DISQUS blog comments, as well as to his or her own blog or blogs.

CommentLuv is another comment plug-in that has attracted a lot of bloggy attention.  This utility automatically visits each commentor’s feed and embeds a link to the commentor’s latest blog post whenever s/he comments.  This, in turn, attracts readers to a commentor’s own blog while also building upon the latter’s own Technorati blog “authority” and Google-ability.

I’ve not yet had time to adopt either of these plug-ins, but would love to hear from any readers who have.  Have they made a difference on your blog?

Possibly-helpful links:

• A list of 100 blogs using CommentLuv (go get yourself some LinkyLuv right now!)
• Interesting discussion on DISQUS: who should own the rights to your comments: you or the blog where you’ve left them?  ( Copyright protocols and blogging continue to evolve!)