Bloghopping through my MyBlogLog visitors led me to a cute little plugin called ClickComments by PostReach. Instead of typing out their comments, your blog visitors can instead click on an icon representing how good your particular post is.

This plugin can be supported in many types of blogging platform such as Blogger, MovableType and of course WordPress. Even the setup looks fairly easy to use. You just need to fill in the form on the right-side of ClickComments’ web site with your blog URL (which is the only compulsory field to fill), and select the style you preferred when your plugin appears in your site. The icons representing the comments can be as simple as two icons representing I Like It / Don’t Like It, to as many as six icons representing Cool / Fun / Insightful / Fell Asleep / I’m Confused / I Disagree.

I suppose this may be a good alternative to using ratings on your posts, but this may not totally replace the traditional comment form that we’re used to. For one thing, the inability for the plugin to record your commentors’ URL would put off some people from commenting for the sake of backlinking (thus avoiding spams, yeay! ). Also, ClickComments may not fit your need if you are looking at your comments section as a community-building platform.

On top of that, the plugin design and icons are still very limited to those options you see in the form. Maybe one of these days ClickComments will have the ability for its users to customize not just the plugin look, but also the types of icons that can be used so that the plugin can be customized to fit a particular blog’s persona or theme.

I was this close to putting this widget into my blog, if not for that fact that my recent web hosting predicament caused me to be aware of my blog’s loading time and avoid anymore plugin and widget add-ins (although the plugins did not cause my problem). I may use something like this in the future or for my other sites.

As part of my support for the NoNoFollow movement, I initially decided to use the easiest DoFollow WordPress plugin there is by Semiologic. However, after just learning about bad neighborhood links, I decided on using a different plugin called NoFollow Case by Case so that I have a greater control over the outgoing links in the comments.

So far I only used it on less than 5 of the mere 1000+ comments I get in this blog due to suspicious back linking. Sooner, though, I feel I should have some sort of comment policy to tell people not to take the comment section in my blog too lightly. I know some of you, particularly one or two who are in the Top Commentators section, are taking advantage of the nofollow option to promote your affiliate/product sites. Don’t overdo it, ’cause if you do, don’t come complaining and spamming me. I wouldn’t care, ’cause this is my blog and I do as I very well please.