While a blog author may serve or prompt the main course, I find that it's often the people who post comments that add the seasoning.
Steve Pavlina explains why he's removed comments from his personal development blog in order to maintain his focus and to preserve the quality of his blog in general:
... I want to maintain certain standards of quality for the blog. If I’m going to support interactivity, then I want to do it right, which means doing more than just approving every comment and then ignoring it. Because of the topics discussed, a lot of comments are questions. Should I simply ignore those questions? That’s something I’ve already had to do on many occasions even though I felt the questions were intelligent and deserved an answer. I feel that if I’m going to support comments, then I should participate in that interactivity rather than simply ignore it.,
I think Steve raises some good points and, given my current backlog of comments on my own blog, this is a timely topic. I was almost convinced to follow Steve's example ... until I realized just how much I've learned from the comments on blogs.
I've decided to leave comments enabled. Please know that I greatly appreciate your comments; please consider this an acknowledgement and a thank you - in advance.
Thanks for visiting my blog!
-Eric
PS. When I have time, I still enjoy reading Steve's personal development blog. He covers many topics of interest to me. While I don't always share Steve's point-of-view, (isn't that the point of blogging?) I respect and admire the way that he approaches each subject and how he explains how he's reached a particular conclusion. Equally interesting to me, is to occasionally read through the comment threads to see what others are saying and how Steve responds. I'll miss the discussion on Steve's blog. Although I did not comment regularly, I enjoyed lurking via RSS.
Discussion/Comments (4):
I have a pretty funny relation with Steve's blog. I like about 60% of what he writes and I'm awfully opposed to the other 40%. I don't know of any other writer that brings out the same behaviour :-)
Posted at 10/18/2005 16:38:18 by Reinout van Rees
No. :)
Posted at 10/20/2005 12:04:49 by Walter
I think questions warrant a response, but general comments don't necessarily. I love comments on my blog. It lets me know there are people out there and also makes the content more rich.
Posted at 10/21/2005 8:16:21 by Kelly
I believe that bloggers should only respond to comments if they have time. Otherwise why not encourge discussion and let some of the comments answer questions?
On the other hand I really dislike having to look through my blocked comments list looking for non-s*p*a*m comments. It does take time. I sure wish I could charge these people for every comment I delete.
Posted at 10/21/2005 17:11:49 by Tanny O'Haley
Discussion for this entry is now closed.