Yesterday, Loic Le Meur announced a new feature for Seesmic’s video commenting toolset.  Now video comments on blogs can be threaded in the same way that numerous services and plugins allow for text comments.  Immediately, Erick Schonfeld over at Techcrunch accused Seesmic of hijacking comments.  Video responses will get lost in the Seesmic player, he reasoned, effectively hiding them from all but the most curious readers.  Loic immediately responded saying that Seesmic was simply presenting users with more options and that they will release new versions of the Seesmic video comment systems based on user response.

However, Erick’s fear that only people who put in a lot of effort will follow the conversation in full is dead on.  But that fact of the blogosphere certainly didn’t just arise with Seesmic’s new features.  It’s true for all comments.  Every blogger on the web will attest to the fact that only a tiny percentage of their readers bother leaving comments.  Some will explain this away as an indication that most people just aren’t interested in participating.  Most are too lazy, shy, or private.  When asked why they don’t participate in more online conversations, most people may even give one or all of these excuses.

Call me crazy, but this kind of person doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve ever met.  Far from being reluctant to tell you what they think, most people LOVE it.  No matter where you go in the world, if you ask people questions about their opinions in the right way, they will answer with relish.  It doesn’t just apply to the web’s power users who make the most use of today’s comment features.  I have seen it with everyone from corporate executives in New York to motorcycle taxi drivers in Cambodia.

Furthermore, people enjoy talking so much that if you listen, they will often lather you with attention, respect and occasionally physical attraction.  Remember that scene in High Fidelity when John Cusack’s character confesses that his secret to picking up women is asking questions and acting interested?  Millions of people pay therapists handsomely to ask them questions and listen.  Dale Carnegie’s ridiculously brilliant yet horribly misnamed classic on interpersonal relationships “How to Win Friends and Influence People” lists six ways to make people like you.  In a way, each is about making people feel comfortable expressing themselves:

• Become genuinely interested in other people.
• Smile.
• Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
• Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves.
• Talk in terms of the other man’s interest.
• Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

People are even more primed to talk about about an issue when they have just consumed some kind of relevant content.  It’s one of the reasons why we teach literature in school.  After reading the Scarlet Letter, we’re more willing to talk about societal rules, desire, judgment and punishment.  And whether you like Michael Moore or not, you can not watch one of his films without wanting to talk about it afterwards.  This dovetails nicely with the fact that just about anyone who creates content, bloggers especially, wants their work to inspire people to think and to talk.

So the question remains: why do such a minority of blog readers interact through the comments?  Why is the blogosphere with all its promise, power and scope limited to a conversation of the few?

Perhaps it’s because the right circumstances for dialogue are not being met.  While they do fill a necessary role for a type of discourse, comment sections are noisy.  They are disorganized.  Like a loud cafeteria, they can be intimidating for the more shy, rushed and passive of us.  To really benefit from conversation in a cafeteria, you need to do a bit of work to find the most interesting table with friendly, inviting people.  And you need to invest in listening to everyone and asking the right questions.  It’s a lot of work for the average person with not a lot of time to spare.

However, those average people are still human and deep down would like to express themselves if given the right opportunity.  With the Qwidget, we are trying to identify and replicate the scenario in which a normally passive blog reader goes the extra mile and engages with the blog’s content and their fellow readers on a deeper level.  In pursuit of this goal, here are some of the things we’re thinking about:

• There is something about being asked the right question at the right time that gets people to open up, no matter how shy they are.
• Most people won’t talk if no one is paying attention.
• Most people see commenting as more laborious than it’s worth.
• It’s annoying that on any issue there are usually several separate places where people are commenting.  Take yesterday’s Seesmic and Techcrunch squabble for example.  There are concurrent conversations on Friendfeed (in several places), Twitter (ditto), Techcrunch, Loic Le Meur’s blog, Duncan Riley’s blog and no doubt countless others.  That is annoying and inefficient.