Benefits of Comments on Blog Posts?

Troshi said:

Ok, so I've got an .edu blog, and yes, it gets spammed to death. I don't have AA, so the amount of comments isn't quite as bad as it might be...

Now, most of these comments are shitty and spammy. But some of them are borderline normal, but not any of them engage a reader into the previous blog post. However, I know that a decent amount of comments is nice for actual readers, its not any fun to comment on a post that no one else seems to have noticed.
But besides possibly engaging future readers, does G00gle take any notice of comments in seo?
Is the extra text of comments going to boost word count enough to make a difference?
Or will approving a decent amount of comments 10-25 hurt my blog because of the possibly duplicate text the bots are using?

Thanks to anyone who can help

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thetroglodyte said:

Yes about a year ago Google updated it's algorithms to be able to read standard wordpress, disqus, facebook and intense debate comments. I would make sure you have "nofollow" turned on your comments section. That should help reduce some of the spam although their are still a lot of morons that don't realize there is such a thing as a nofollow code so they will post anyway.

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