Though far from being a scientific test, the popup Ratings module (code provided by Sean) I placed on this site a couple of days ago suggests that the only way to get Ratings due attention is by making the module visible.

# of site ratings on my site before visibility: 2
# of site ratings on my site after visibility:    6

So, in just two days my rating numbers tripled.

For the sparse traffic I get here, that 6 compares pretty well with the 18 site ratings number that TheTheologiansCafe currently has from his hidden Ratings module.  He gets about 10 times the attention that I do here but has only 3 times the ratings number.

Moreover, TheTheologiansCafe last five posts have a combined 1 rating, while my last post has 3 of itself.

Again, all of this is not statistically scientific, but suggestive.

Caution: Ignore everything written below unless you want your brain to hurt.  Take a shortcut for grabbing comment links and read Sean's solution to my convolutedness.   However, Sean's solution works only for comments on one's own blog.  If you want to feature comments from another's blog, convolution rules.

Unrelated note:  A couple of posts ago, I made a link to a specific comment by John.  Do you all know how to construct such links?  Here it is:

http://www.xanga.com/notforprophet/500376003/item.html?nextdate=1118297115&direction=n#1118297115

If you click on it, it takes you directly to John's comment on my post, not just the top of the comment page itself.  I think this is nifty (did I just use that word?) when you want to bring attention to another's comment in the original context without forcing your readers to search through all the comments on a post.

The first number (in this case, 500376003) is the unique number (uid) assigned to the post itself on the comment page URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).  If you click to comment on any post, you'll see that post's uid in the URI in your browser's address box. 

The second and third numbers (in this case, 1118297115) refer to the specific comment of interest (John's, in this case) on that page.  I obtained it by looking at the source code for the comment page (in most browsers, View, Source or View, Page Source), locating the specific comment, finding the number (maybe it's called a 'cid', comment id?) asscoiated with it, and then using it in the second and third number positions to create the link above.

You find the specific comment id # associated with a person's comment in the (example):

<a name="1118297115">

code that directly precedes the comment.  (As a side note, the first comment on a post doesn't get a number to reference but simply reports <a name="firstcomment"> !)

I only wish there were an easier way to identify a comment's id and to constuct such links dynamically.