Via ProBlogger came the question, “Should blogs have comments?” Darren Rowse posed this question to generate conversation about the idea. Interestingly enough, there are 111 comments with small conversations going on in Darren’s comment section.
I could stop here and say that the want for 100 different people to make a comment is reason enough to have comments.
Still, the very essence of blogging is its place as a conversation starter. It is only natural that the best place for the conversation to take place is on the blog where the conversation began. It should be nowhere else.
Now back to the issue of whether blogs should have comments. Take Marc Andreessen’s blog. He has comments turned off, and trackbacks left on. Marc is a very influential entrepreneur based upon what he has done previously with Netscape and currently with Ning, among others. People care what Marc talks about. Marc has a community waiting to be created, but doesn’t allow for it to be created. Allowing trackbacks are great, but they do nothing more than showing where the conversation is happening (somewhere other than his blog). I am sure Marc has written on his blog about not having comments, but he doesn’t have a simple search feature on his blog, like Lijit, for me to find it. So, Marc must not care about sharing his content, and therefore I’ll stop searching. This is not a criticism of Marc, but I do think it is ironic that a Founder of Ning, a place to create social networks, would seem to do the opposite of creating a conversation.
Another example of a blog without comments is Seth Godin’s blog. Seth writes:
I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters. I’m already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.
I can understand Seth’s problem. He feels compelled to answer his community, but it disrupts his writing. Therefore we, the reader, benefit from not having Seth answer his commenters. That being said, I still believe Seth could manage his tribe better with a better comment system. It would go a long way in solving his mentioned problems. Seth allows for trackbacks, but again, all trackbacks do is tell you where the conversation you started is happening. I think Seth would be a rockstar if he could still write as he normally does and have comments installed.
A great example of someone who has a great blog because of their comment system is Fred Wilson. Fred uses Disqus, a competitor to Intense Debate, and has seen his comments go up in quality and number since he installed their system. This is a tribute to the innovation in third party commenting. Still, Fred does a great job interacting within the comments and the community flourishes because of it.
It is all about the dark matter.
Now for some comment comedy (profanity warning):
