In an average day I visit 20-30 blogs and I’ll only comment on 4 or 5 of them, why is that?

Your talking about something of which I have no idea
If I don’t know you I’m hardly going to know who Petronella is am I? Why am I going to care that you went shopping and bought this this and this. If you word things like your speaking to your friends you can’t expect some stranger to have any clue what your talking about. Similarly you cannot refer to past incidences without first linking to them so a new and uninitiated reader can understand you.

You’ve gone all ‘emo’
I tend to shy away from emotional posts, I’d rather say something constructive other than ‘aww I hope you feel better’ which never helps.

You’ve written about something controversial
As above, I wont say anything unless I have something of substance to say. I’m not going to mindlessly agree or disagree with you unless I’ve read about the subject and the chances are your post links to an article about it with no other reference material, and if you did write more about it I doubt I’d comment then because unless I have a keen interest in what you have to say I’m not going to read it.

You’ve written a massively long post
Yesterday I posted my How to write your own wordpress theme tutorial. It was massive, so I made an index using anchors. If your post isn’t long enough to demand such indexing, how about using little headlines and breaking things up. Highlighting important bits, like I’m doing in this post. I guarantee you no reader will read this post word for word, they’ll just skip around for an interesting bit, a bit that’s highlighted perhaps or a bit that contains a link. Please use highlighting sparingly though!

I can’t read your post
It might be because of your layout, your style of writing or the font you’ve chosen, but if I can’t read it I’m hardly going to comment about it.

I’m not interested in what you have to say
This is my little dig at the money making blogs out there. Your usually telling me things I already know through common sense (much like this post is now!) which means i’m not interested!

I don’t like you/your site
Its childish and immature, but we all do it. We all make a first impression of a person from their website, or their posts in a forum. I don’t much like to whore myself out for fear of the image I’m giving out. I might also not like you because I think your better than me, I’m the jealous type ok - you should probably be flattered by that though! (Although sometimes I wont tell you I don’t like you, because I’m a suck up!)

I’m too lazy
I’ve read your article, I think hey this is great, but I just can’t be bothered to click that little comment link. (or I might want to and can’t find it!) I just can’t face waiting for another page to load then scrolling through lots of comments. This could be because my FF is painfully slow of course! Another thing stopping me from commenting, or looking at it another way stopping you from finding out about my comments is Text Patterns annoying habit of making you preview a comment and then post it. I know what I typed now let me post it - don’t make me read it again please! Sometimes I close a page before I’ve submitted the comment because I haven’t realised it was only a preview!