I think Jeff Atwood hit the nail on the head when he said:

It's an open secret in the blogging community that the comments are often better than the original blog entry itself. Would you browse Amazon without the user reviews? No? Then why would you willingly choose to run your blog that way?

Don't be afraid of comments. Embrace them. Moderate them. The community will respect you for it, and your blog will be better for it as well.

Not only are comments sometimes interesting potentially offering differing points of view, but more than once I've had someone find my blog and leave a comment which solves the issue I was having.  How cool is that?  Even better, the next person having the same issue might be led to my blog by Google and find the answer right there in the comment.

Comments are valuable, which made me realize I need to do everything I can to help encourage comments.  The default setup for leaving comments in dasBlog is too much work IMO and overall isn't a great experience.  So last week I decided to improve the comment experience on this blog.  Here's a summary of what I did:

1. Turned off CoComments which implied an extra form to fill out to submit a comment.  I think this just annoyed people and kept them from commenting. I know I didn't like the extra step.
2. I added Gravatars, which are global recognized avatars (i.e.they work on any site that supports them).  I think this really helps people identify the comment author and makes the comment a touch more personal.
3. I enabled comments to always show on a post entry.  Previously an extra click was required to see comments... which discouraged people to read or add comments.  Now comments always show because comments are important.  I find it almost silly that dasBlog warns against enabling this setting - granted it says for high volume sites (which isn't me).
4. Email addresses are now hidden on the blog post entry.  I think most people don't really like their email addresses showing up even if they are somewhat obfuscated on the blog post page.  From now on your email address will not show, but will still allow me to reply back to you via email.  When I reply to a comment I will post it to this blog and then reply to your email with my comment so that you know I've responded.  Unfortunately I couldn't find a way for dasBlog to automatically do this for me.

I'm hoping these changes will make my blog a bit more comment friendly for everyone.  So, try it out and let me know what you think... by leaving a comment ;)