I’ve been reviewing user comments posted on sites that skew younger like Techcrunch, Boing Boing and Facebook verses comments posted on sites that skew older like USA Today, LA Times and Wall Street Journal.  What I found probably wont surprise anyone.  It seems that people aged 30 or older simply don’t participate in community discussions or leave comments for others to view.  They don’t build profiles, poke each other or turn their colleagues into werewolves.  Older folks seem to observe only.  When older folks do comment or participate, you can clearly see there is some critical thinking involved.  I scanned various blogs on Wall Street Journal and noticed that most posts had 2 or 3 comments.  I also noticed each of those comments was fairly long and the comment dove deeper into the subject.  The Wall Street Journal site commands nearly 7 million unique visitors monthly and those users have executive careers therefore I was surprised to see so few comments.  I also looked at posts on Techcrunch which only boasts 1 million users.  Many of the Techcrunch posts had 75 or more comments but most of the comments were short, silly, insulting or just plain dumb.  So Techcrunch had roughly 20 times the comments of Wall Street Journal with roughly 1/7^th the audience.   Even on our own site, Congoo’s story pages and expert commentator posts see fairly significant viewership but Congoo’s users skew older (43) so they don’t leave many comments.  Now before you tell me I’m generalizing without doing a real scientific comparison, I’ll admit that this is not a scientific study.  My point is that I spend a lot of time on the Web, about 5 hours a day, and I truly believe that community participation such as commenting is a young mans game.  You can also surmise the age of a commenter by the tone of the comment.  In most cases a site’s comments and its user's behaviors display like the soul of a site.  Look at Yahoo’s top 10 overall searches.  Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson etc.  Do you really need a media kit to understand this audience?  So I say, bring on the transparency of social media because it makes it easier for marketers to see the value in interacting with an audience.