Let’s continue with the subject of building brands and keeping control of your content. There’s this issue with comments. A growing number of people who write their own blogs want better control of all the comments that they leave on other sites. Comments represent ideas and opinions that can add to the value of your brand.

Services like Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment try to solve the problem by centralizing all of a user’s comments but only on sites where those services are supported. You can solve this problem yourself by adhering to a very simple comment doctrine.

Any time you find a comment extending past a couple of sentences you should stop yourself and write the comment as a blog post. When you write the blog post make sure that you link directly to the post you are commenting on. If the original blogger has trackbacks enabled then the link to your post should show up in the comment section of the post you’re commenting on. Since not all blogs support trackbacks you can’t necessarily count on that, but you still retain the value of your opinion.

Everything you do online amounts to some kind of a trade off. In this case you draw a line. Short thoughts are deposited as comments. More complex thoughts get served up to your readers with a tip of the hat to the original author.

This is a situation where a common sense approach removes the need for complex technology solutions. And I believe that everyone gets what they need in this scenario. The original author either gets a comment or a link. And the would be commenter gets to choose an entry point to the discussion that meets their needs.

This approach won’t fly for some people. I know there are some people out there who would rather be represented in the comments on a hot post because they want the benefit of the visibility in a post they know will get traffic. In that case you should consider your comment a gift a be glad that you had the opportunity to have your say.