Comments “On” or “Off”?

Posted by Daniel on June 13th 2006 to Edublogging



I’ve been in a sort of dialogue with Charles on the issue of having comments enabled or disabled on one’s blog. His post on the question makes for a good read. I approached it with the assumption that I should come away either convince or unconvinced, but now I see that I don’t have to be either.

While the blog medium was developed in order to facilitate a type of social interaction between reader and writer, that does not mean that people will and or must use it as such. There are plenty of hammers in the world and yet some of us will choose a can of yellow cling peaches, the heel of a shoe or a brick for the job if it is closer at hand. :)  People are relatively free to administer their blogs as they see fit. The only problem is when a blogger has a particular purpose for blogging and fails to achieve that purpose, and then the problem is really only his own.

What I’ve come to appreciate about Charles’ blog (as well as some others) is the clear purpose which appears to be behind it. He says that his blog is about his learning and it’s clear that the way he administers it without enabling comments serves his purpose in a satisfactory manner. I think that makes it (in some manner) a good blog. After having read his post on the matter, I’m not in agreement with all of his points nor do I have to be. And since Charles has kindly added my blogfolio to his blogroll AND comments are enabled here, we can have a type of social interaction if we want to.

* 3 Comments

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3 Responses to “Comments “On” or “Off”?”

  1.   EFL Geek
    June 13th, 2006 | 9:16 am

    If an author choose to disable comments I think that is fine, I don’t really support it, but that’s a fair choice. What bothers me is that authors who have comments enabled but never respond to any comments by their readership.

  2.   Daniel
    June 13th, 2006 | 11:42 am

    it’s easy to see why that would be irritating but i have to say that i haven’t really run across that situation yet.

    also, when i leave a comment on a blog for the first time, i tend to do it without expectations. if an exchange doesn’t take place, i’m simply not likely to leave a comment again in the future.

  3.   Charles Nelson
    June 14th, 2006 | 1:55 pm

    I’ve written another post, mostly Questions on Blog Commenting, one of which is, What would happen if everyone enabled trackback instead of commenting and responded more in depth on their own blogs?