Blogs, specifically special-interest blogs, generate in-depth discussions. These discussions offer a new window for researching emerging trends in both consumer behavior and social-political attitudes. Many people try to influence these discussions and trends via participation, but making an impact is not guaranteed. Not all comments have the same degree of influence, since certain comments garner more visibility and generate more replies and discussion due to various website moderations. In essence, some comments become “shouts” in the midst of countless whispers in online communities. Discovering the circumstances in which a given comment is more likely to become a shout provides insight into how popular comments are made. Understanding these comments lead to improved site design as we can discover the content of the most popular comments. Through investigating a particular blog, several factors were found which have significant influence on the creation of “shouts”. This study uses the term “memetic primers” for those styles that most often cause readers to take notice of a particular comment and remember information included in it. The memetic primers were derived in a two-phase study. The first phase discovered the memetic primers using a discourse analysis of an online community. These memetic primers were then verified quantitatively in a field test. While evidence indicated that the usefulness of some primers was low, it emerged that negatively written comments had the strongest impact on a comment’s volume.