Blogs
Not learning from Dave Winer
Joel Spolsky is a smart guy who writes a great blog called Joel On Software — a blog on which he recently posted something that is completely wrong. Okay, not completely wrong, but more wrong than it is right. And I’m not just saying that because I have something against Dave Winer — I don’t. But I think Joel is wrong to tell us that we should learn something from Dave when it comes to comments on blogs.
This is something I have written a fair bit about — most recently here — because I think it’s an important question. In fact, I think it was one of the first big issues I tackled when I started this blog (that post also involved Dave Winer, who got mad at me for criticizing him over not having comments). A debate went around and around at that time about whether a blog without comments is still a blog, and my position then was — and still is — that a blog without comments may technically be a blog, but it is missing a giant part of what makes blogs powerful.
As Clay Shirky points out at Corante, there may be dozens (if not thousands) of examples of how comments are stupid and the people who make them are morons, as Joel alleges in his post. But at the same time, there are also plenty of examples of posts (including some of my own) in which the comments held more information and generated more thought and debate than the post that sparked them.
To be fair to Dave, he does allow comments — just not many of them, and only occasionally. That’s clearly the way he wants to run his blog, which is fine. And there’s no question that having comments requires some management, or what I call social gardening. But I think blogs — and blog readers and writers — are better for having them.
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mesh
busted tees
Hmmm, I don’t think you’re right about Dave’s comments - I don’t think he selectively opens them, he just doesn’t turn and point to them often. I comment all the time over on the Annex, where every new post from Scripting.com is aggregated during the day. It’s here.
A blog is a blog with or without comments. Really, it isn’t up to you to define. It never was and won’t ever be.
Essentially, you’re saying that because you are personally inoffensive enough not to elicit harmful coments, or are tough enough to tolerate the comments your site receives, everyone should tolerate whatever comments their sites receive. You discount entirely the fact that even reading a comment one goes on to expunge or delete can be harmful to a site owner. People write derogatory and pejorative comments *deliberately*. Remove the option and one *never* needs to deal with that degree of abuse.
They’re our blogs, not yours, and our blogs without comments are not the lesser creations you claim they are. You simply do not get to define the medium.
Some of us don’t write blog posts for networking or “conversation” or any such malarkey. Blogs are personal publishing; your claim that they really aren’t blogs unless they are two-way is mere ideology – not to mention hypocritical, given that you still write for a one-way medium, a print newspaper.
Thanks, Karoli.
And Joe, if you go back and read what I actually wrote — instead of what you think I wrote — you’ll notice that I didn’t say blogs without comments aren’t blogs, or that I’m trying to define what is or isn’t a blog. I simply said that blogs without comments are missing something — in my opinion. You’re entitled to your own opinion, obviously.
As for my comments being hypocritical, the medium I write for primarily is the Globe’s website, which has comments on every news story (with very few exceptions) for the same reasons I referred to in my post above.
Dave Winer got angry? No, say it isn’t so ;-)