Comments on: A blog without comments is a Personal Web site

By: Michael Fowke

Michael Fowke — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:12:20 +0000

I have a blog without comments - so what? You can call it my personal website if you want to - why should I care what someone calls it? I know what it is. It is a blog! What’s the problem?

There are too many blog fascists around who want to tell other people what they should be doing.

By: blog

blog — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:43:51 +0000

thanks paull good writee

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:27:34 +0000

Quite true. Without comments the author is posting news without debate, with comments we have ourselves a blog

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:18:18 +0000

@aces - isn’t that called a Web site? Why didn’t have the term blog during the early/mid 90’s when people had ‘personal journals’ online, so why invent a term to represent something new if it’s not in fact new?

By: aces

aces — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 02:01:18 +0000

I think blog should be something like a personal online diary and comments by other users are optional.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:06:43 +0000

I’d have to agree on the comments requirement. As does Jeff Atwood in his Thirteen Blog Cliches, it comes in at #13. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000834.html

I assume the reason for blogs becoming so popular is that the software is very easy for people to throw up something - and that can be read two ways - so they do. You just have to click randomly through blogger etc. to see how many people have 1 and 2 post blogs.

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:32:11 +0000

Thanks for the link Gerry, I thought of it highly enough to update the actual post.

By: Gerry Hanratty

Gerry Hanratty — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:44:47 +0000

I remember reading something similar on Techcrunch before, Michael Arrington wrote “I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.” I’d have to agree with that.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/31/what-is-the-definition-of-a-blog/

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:58:41 +0000

@Dennis - I don’t suppose it matters that much. I’m in favour of using correct terminology as it otherwise confuses people. For me, blogs are used as the main implementation of Web 2.0. When explaining the art of conversation using Web 2.0 principles/technology to marketeers, it’s important (to me) that they don’t get confused by listening to someone else who doesn’t believe in two-way conversation on what they call a blog. That’s just confusing in my opinion.

@Julian - you’re probably right. We wrote a post about how to retain your readership by enabling granular syndication. You can get updates to our blog based on comments, author, topics or the entire blog by RSS. You can also subscribe to the global feed and comments by email. Isn’t it much nicer for us to notify you about someone leaving a comment after you? I think it’s vital as commentators like to comment on each others opinion and not just that of the original author.

By: Julian Bond

Julian Bond — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:47:23 +0000

*If* a blog has “email with replies” then you can follow up. But it’s rare. Isn’t it? On a good day (or a bad one) my morning catch up might involve leaving 10 comments on 10 different blogs. I hardly ever go back to see if anyone replied. And within half an hour I will have forgotten where I posted anyway. So the point is that there’s no good way to track all the conversations you’re having on all the de-centralised websites out there. And this really comes back to the lack of good solutions for Few-To-Few group discussions. Doing it via distributed blog posts doesn’t work. Doing it in the comments sections of multiple blogs doesn’t work. Doing it via Twitter posts isn’t great. Mailing lists are old school. IRC has no history. and so on, and so on.

I have a UK Political Blog aggregator. (voidstar.com/ukpoliblog) with getting on for 1000 blogs on it now. It’s surprising just how many old school political sites have added a “blog” facility but without RSS. I suspect it’s because they paid a design house to build the site 5 years ago and then the design house disappeared! The same goes for the “blogs” on some of the big Media sites. They followed the Guardian’s lead and introduced “Blogs” from their celebrity journalists. But without RSS or comments or indeed any way of responding.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:17:12 +0000

Does it really matter? A person’s web presence is entirely their affair and not something I’d chose to opine on. FWIW - Winer does have a comment site. I’ve pretty much canned email. RSS is much easier and faster to consume. The fact that few people use it is neither here not there.

Where blog comments are implemented, it’s much easier to follow threaded comments rather than a river of stuff. IMO.

Interestingly, my RSS traffic outstrips my page view traffic but then I do publish a full feed on my own site - many don’t. Like ZDN - drives me nuts.

By: Paul Walsh

Paul Walsh — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:39:21 +0000

@Julian, I appreciate people who turn off comments due to SPAM, but there are ways of combating that.

Comments aren’t difficult to follow if the blog enables the same type of functionality as we do here. You should receive an email whenever someone leaves a comment after you (that is of course, unless it has been removed or not working right now)

Why do you think RSS should be a requirement? Would subscription by email be sufficient? There are still so many people who don’t know what RSS is.

By: Julian Bond

Julian Bond — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:35:07 +0000

I don’t know what a blog is, but I know one when I see one.

For me Comments is not a requirement, but an RSS/Atom feed is. And I can well understand why people turn off comments when dealing with spam and moderation can be a huge and unwelcome extra workload.

I also think that Blog Comments are a really bad way to have conversations because it’s typically so hard to follow up and see what other people have said about your comment.