Most of your visitors don’t leave comments on your site.  That goes without saying.  But one interesting related question is will they take some other sort of action.  Can you entice them to participate in a dialogue on your site by offering an easier way to initiate conversations than diving right away into the chaotic commentosphere?

A quick look at a two websites suggests that users are more willing to interact on publisher web sites than the usual absence of comments suggests.

On Download.com’s blog, The Download Blog, there is an article about Google taking Chrome out of beta. The article accumulated a whopping 100 comments in the few days since it was published.  However, in the same amount of time, over 10,000 people answered a Polldaddy poll that accompanied the article.  For every commenter, there were 100 people who clicked the poll.  These are people who were moved enough to take an action based on their opinion.  In that moment of motivation, Download.com lost an opportunity to engage them further by offering another simple way of increasing their participation.

In another example, the celebrity site Oceanup.com posts pictures of the sisters of famous actresses with the question: who is the cutest? While only 60 readers left comments with their thoughts, over 18,000 people weighed in on a poll that accompanied the post.  In this case, 300 times more readers answered the poll than left a comment.  Among these 18,000 people who took initiative to express themselves, how many more would have taken another simple step if one was offered?

The Qwidget was designed to capitalize on these missed opportunities.

Note: To all the bloggers signing up to test the Qwidget, I apologize for not being able to release it you sooner.  We are fixing a few stability/usability issues before opening up our doors.

Laurie Meadoff, co-founder of the Qwidget’s parent company Chat Ventures, was featured in a slideshow on businessweek.com yesterday.  The slideshow accompanied an article about the Springboard VC Forum, a showcase for women-owned businesses in which we participated last week.  The Forum was great.  We were all really inspired by the work of the incredible women entrepreneurs and were honored to be showcasing the Qwidget.

I spent most of the day in the lobby giving quick demos to other entrepreneurs and potential future users of the Qwidget.  If you follow me on Twitter, you’d have known that already.

We’re excited that we’re already getting some good coverage of our company and our product before we even launch it.  That being said, expect to see the Qwidget working on this blog in the coming days.

Phew….Chrome renders the Qwidget blog just fine.