How Do People Interact with Blogs?

I just encountered a situation where I honestly wasn't sure what I should do. A comment was made by Paul Coyne on my post Corporate Learning Laggards? I think the comment is so good that I'm writing a blog post to respond to the comment. Normally, I would just write a comment back, but my belief is that most people (including myself) don't read the comment stream unless it is a really interesting post OR if someone specifically posts that there is a really interesting comment stream. Thus, I'd hate for readers of my blog to miss out on something that I think is pretty interesting. At the same time, this feels lame?

Part of the issue is that I have only rudimentary stats on readership of my blog and I'm making some assumptions about how people read my blog and how they participate. More specifically, I have a rough idea of how many people subscribe (500) based on a crude extrapolation of feedburner, feedblitz, and bloglines numbers. This could be way off, but I don't really have a good way of tracking. I also know that I get about 200 visitors a day to the blog site itself, but very few maybe 50 will come through an RSS reader. Thus, most people do what I do:

Most blog readers read entries in the RSS reader and never touch the blog.

This is why I argued previously that You Should Provide Full Feeds on your blog so that readers don't have to visit. However, the net effect is that if this is reality, then:

Most comments are buried in the blog - out of sight of most blog readers.

However, I could be completely wrong about how people interact with blogs. Obviously, if you are seeing this post, you read blogs. But, the question is: How do you Interact with Blogs?

• Do you only read the RSS feed?
• Do you ever click to the blog post itself (as opposed to the links it provides - which would be on another blog)? If so, why did you click?
• Do you ever leave comments?
• Do you ever read comments? If so, how did you find them?

Important: if you are a person who normally doesn't click through and leave comments, its okay to do it this time. :)

And if you are a blogger with insights into this more generally, I would love to hear it.