I have a couple of questions to pose to my readers. While this may be better suited as a post over at Blogging Questions, I am going to post it here anyway.

When I first started this site, I didn’t give much thought to avatars in comments. However, after the site had been live for a little while I decided that I wanted to add them, partly because everyone else had them. At the time, pretty much the entire blogosphere used MyBlogLog not only for a “Recent Visitors” widget, but also for their comment avatars. Since it was the most commonly found option at the time (and I already had an account for my “Recent Readers” section on the sidebar) I decided to implement and use it as well.

However, in recent times (especially now with WordPress 2.7 having it built-in) I have noticed several bloggers switching to Gravatar for the avatars in the comments. I have also seen a few other options and people doing different things, such as Blog Catalog, as well. I know that it is possible to continue to use MyBlogLog avatars even in WordPress 2.7 and it does seem that a few people still use it.

So, this leads me to my questions:

First of all, I currently have a MyBlogLog account and use that, but should I perhaps setup accounts with some of these other places that have features like this? Which ones would your recommened or suggest I avoid and for what reasons? I’m thinking I should perhaps get myself a Gravatar simply because that is what comes built-in with WordPress but would like to get some additional opinions.

Secondly, as a blog owner, is there any way to integrate multiple sources so that if someone leaves a comment but doesn’t have an avatar of the “preferred” program that their avatar from somewhere else can be used instead? This sounds like something that could probably be done quite simply from a plugin…

Finally, what is the method that you use on your site and what is your reasoning/justification behind it?

For now, I’ll most likely continue to exclusively use MyBlogLog, but I have recently been thinking about this simply because of the number of sites that seem to no longer be using MyBlogLog in their comments (and in some cases, not even the “Recent Readers” feature) opting instead for other methods.