You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day. And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, it’s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories we’ve added comment search to WordPress.com search. Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and we’ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To reduce the comment inferiority complex you get many of the same features and options as post search: sorting by relevance (the default) or most recent, limit results by blog (like site:gigamom.com) and an easy way to subscribe to new matches via an RSS feed ( the Follow this search via RSS link at the bottom of the sidebar). Comment search, because it was about time comments got a bit more respect.

Some of you may have noticed we’ve been experimenting with a new feature in comments here on WordPress.com, namely that you can now embed YouTube videos and PollDaddy polls directly in a comment. Although shortcodes are great and we’ll continue to support and encourage them for comments the simplest possible interface seemed to be just a URL. The URL is all you’ll need to include a YouTube video or PollDaddy poll. To try it out copy and paste the permalink for a video or a poll on PollDaddy Answers and put it on its own line in a comment, like enter enter http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1598108/ enter enter. You’ll now have a poll embedded in the comment just like this: View Poll (By the way, I have a Kindle 2 and it’s the bestest thing since sliced beer.) Of course if someone leaves a video or poll you don’t like it’s just like them leaving something else you don’t like, you can always delete it or edit it to remove the offending link. As you and your audience start to play with this it should spice up comments a bit, and based on your feedback we may expand this to encompass other shortcodes and embeds in the future. Keep commentin’.