One of the prime reasons to start and maintain a blog, especially for business purposes, is the conversation that might happen when you publish a post.

You have something to say that others might have some views on, in agreement or disagreement, perhaps branching out in a related topic direction. Enabling others to add their perspectives to your post in the form of a comment is the foundation point for making a conversation happen, and connecting all the points of view in one place so you can, well, follow the conversation and add your views if you wish to.

The advent of third-party commenting systems like Disqus, Intense Debate or Livefyre – and more recently, with Facebook and Google+ – has offered bloggers myriad features and levels of service to manage commenting way beyond the native commenting features of a particular blog platform. (I’ve tried all of these at one time or another, but have reverted back always to native WordPress commenting features enhanced by Jetpack, the uber-plugin for WordPress blogs.)

What’s been an interesting development in the past few years is how the means of conversation is changing from comments made directly in the place where a particular post is published, to almost anywhere else on the social web and linked to the place where the post is published.

The nature of a comment has changed, too. In the past, you’d write a paragraph, perhaps, certainly a line or two with your perspective. Now, a tweet will often do. Or a Facebook like and a Google +1.

Today, comments happen anywhere and everywhere, all connected in a searchable, discoverable and shareable ecosystem.

As an example, take a look at one of my posts last year that has 120 comments.

If you look closely, you’ll see that there are 42 actual comments, ie, responses to the post made directly on the post via the commenting facility offered by the blog.

The rest comprises a mixture of tweets, retweets, Facebook likes, Google +1s or shares, and trackbacks. Jetpack treats all of it simply as ‘comments.’

While you should treat the precise numbers with a slight pinch of salt – I always see discrepancies reported in the adding-up – the important point is that all of the comments made, wherever they take place, are linked and connected to the blog post that prompted someone to comment somewhere.

What’s equally interesting is seeing how comments elsewhere now usually are greater in numbers than comments made directly on a blog post. There are multiple reasons for this trend, including shifts in behaviours about commenting – a ‘like’ is a good as a thousand words – more places where you can make a comment, in tune with your own preferences; and less time these days for lengthy discourse.

So I found it most interesting when I read of the plans by CopyBlogger to do away with native commenting and, instead, encourage comments elsewhere that would be linked to a blog post on the highly-trafficked CopyBlogger blog.

Here’s the rationale:

[…] If you’re going to put the work in to articulate your thoughts, to make an intelligent argument, and to bring something fresh to the conversation … you should be putting that work into your site, not ours.

Not that we haven’t loved having you! We absolutely have. But now I want to challenge you to take that great thinking and writing and use it to build your audience rather than ours.

Something in one of our posts strike a chord? Something you disagree with, or think is powerful, or could be amplified? Make those points … on your site.

Now if you want to link back to us, of course we would love that. But the main goal here is to make the ideas your own — to create your own expression, your own take. (Which we can’t wait to see.)

It’s an interesting idea, and Copyblogger’s push is admirable. They also say that managing spam comments has become a major issue, which was a factor in their decision.

What’s key, I believe, is that comments, wherever they’re made, connect with the subject of the comment, in this case, blog posts. That way, you get to see the entirety of the conversation, the discussion, the exchange of views.

I remember in 2008 when Twitter in particular started becoming a tool that people started using for commenting about content published on blogs and other places. Then, there was no easy way to connect the dots, as it were, until a pioneer like Shannon Whitley created a brilliant WordPress plugin called Chat Catcher that captured those tweets and added them to a post as comments.

In one stroke, Shannon’s workaround solved the disconnect problem that was beginning to be a concern. Sadly, Chat Catcher finally met its sunset in late 2010.

Today, though, there are many ways to ensure that a blog post and subsequent comments – be they replies on a post, tweets, Likes, +1s, whatever – are connected automatically and more or less seamlessly, such as tools I’ve mentioned earlier, if not (yet) wholly accurately in terms of numbers.

I won’t follow Copyblogger’s example and disable commenting here as I believe it’s part of your choice as a reader and would-be commenter where you want to join the conversation. Commenting directly here is just one of your choices.

As long as all the dots connect, the freedom of choice in the method of commenting is entirely up to you.