How important is commenting for bloggers?

How important is commenting for a blogger? Ask any blogger, amateur or professional and you'll find that its the life's blood of blogging. As important as the post are the comments. Following this thought I was surfing the net when I came across Harsh Agarwal's blog Shout me loud. It has a host of posts on "commenting on blogs."
The worst part of commenting is that only a blogger can appreciate the importance of it. Several of my friends whom I give the address of my blog never comment. I came to know that they visited my blog, when inadvertently during conversation they mention something that I have written there.
So this one is for my blogger friends. I came across two sites which may prove useful for bloggers. One is actually an Add on to firefox Easy comment, which helps in commenting easily on Wordpress blogs and the other is Backlink watch from where you can see all the sites linking your website and evaluate how many times people landed on your website through them.

Thanks to Shout me loud