As a trial, I added a “recent comments” plugin on the right side so you can see what everyone’s talking about on my blog.
The positive aspect of this is natural – you can see the hot topics, or stay tuned to what people respond to.
The negative aspect is that you find out pretty quickly that I’m the primary poster of comments… which is pretty sad if you think about it. I mean, the blog is about me, the posts are written *by* me, and usually the posts themselves are about me. And then I’m the one writing comments on my posts. I’m either very self-centered, or pitifully lonely in this online world.
I think I’d rather be self-centered 
I like the new plugin – you get kudos for that. Can you gimme the code for that so I can use it on my blog. Or is it a word press thang?
Ah, I got the plugin from http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/ and then did some customization on my own of css style sheets. It is a WordPress plugin that makes a nice admin page under options, and then you just need to add some code to sidebar.php.