Search For Blogs To Post Comments To
I’ll assume that you are using Google for this, although the principle should extend cross-search engine.
What To Type Into Google
First things first, I put a requirement in for “powered by wordpress” in the search string. You can use “powered by moveable type” or “powered by typepad”, but the results are rubbish. I’m working on a fix for this. Besides, Wordpress is the big daddy of open source & free blogging software, so don’t worry about any apart from Wordpress for the time being.
Add to this the subject you are searching for, eg canoeing.
Additional Checks
The issue with the previous search string is that it will find Wordpress blogs that do or do not have comments. We can only test for Wordpress blogs that do have comments. So you can either cycle through and manually find the ones with comments, or you can add another string to the search with Google. Add something like “3 comments” or “5 responses” to your search string.
The upside to this is that you will home in on blogs more quickly that do have comments associated with them. The downside is that you’ll often hit the index, archive or compendium page of the blog, with several articles on it. Not such a problem, but it can add a bit of time to each search as you go back two or more pages instead of one.
Tinker around to see how more or less numbers of comments are used in your target area. There will be more blogs with less comments, but this is offset by the blog posts with greater numbers of comments probably being more popular, and in all likelihood having a greater PageRank value.
You might find other phrases and hacks work. If you’ve got any interesting ones, send them in and I might buy you a coffee.