Blog comments are fine, but I wish I could emphasize them more. Especially since we all seem to feel like the good stuff is in comments.

Oh and I love blog comments. I'm not quite ready to switch over to twitter for comments.

Blog comments are fine, but I wish I could emphasize them more. Especially since we all seem to feel like the good stuff is in comments.

Oh and I love blog comments. I'm not quite ready to switch over to twitter for comments.

I wonder if adding Stack Overflow-style goodness to a blog commenting system would work. Disqus tries to do some of this w/points and aggregation of comments, but it's not obvious or well-known enough to get much traction.

Comments are definitely an area that needs reputation. That would really help.

I also wonder about the how to find a medium between blog and forum where everyone's content is equally valued and indexed. We all seem to agree that comments often hold the good information, so how can we emphasize that?

I totally agree, natch.

You do create a lot of content around your responses to other people's posts, which I like. Comments tend to get lost and are largely ignored, so it makes a lot of sense to either go quick and dirty (w/Twitter) or go fully baked in long format w/a blog post and linklove.

I'm on to something here, I know it.

“I guess I was assuming that Twitter would suffice, else for longer replies, you'd write your own post ”

This is probably a personal issue, but Twitter's length is just too much of a constraint for me. Take this tweet in response to another tweet – by the time that I added the person's name, and a parenthetical statement explaining what I was talking about (in case the tweet was seen in isolation), I didn't have a lot of characters left to make my actual comment.

(Ironically, my tweet is going to result in a blog post.)

While I could issue a blog post in response to every single thing I read, in my mind that would be overkill. I see some benefit in leaving a comment (such as this one) at the original post – kind of a halfway point between a short tweet and a full-fledged blog post.

My main reason for noodling about replacing blog comments with Twitter is to broaden the commenting audience, but that might be impossible and undesirable

Glad you decided to stay and add to the party.

My blog is full of random rubbish, so comments are usually quite fun because they are equally random.

My website: I get really frustrated when people start trying to use the article comments for technical questions. It's not the right place for it and there is a message in “MASSIVE” font saying use the forum. I often think about turning the comments off on my website.

Forums (including my own): I go through periods of love and hate with forums. So often people write questions that God would struggle to understand, and other people pitch in with answers that are plain wrong or abusive.

Twitter: Like Facebook, I rarely go near twitter these days. It just doesn't add value. It's like having email without a spam filter. I just read piles and piles of dirge for one nugget of interest. It's not worth the ROI.

I find my reading list getting tighter and tighter so I don't have to waste time on crap.

Cheers

Tim…

Tend to agree about the value of comments, Gary mentioned that above; problem is it's tough to know what kind of blog you're commenting on when you get a random trackback. I seem to hit all the broadcast only ones

I guess it's not entirely fair to normalize all blog comments, but I'd prefer John Gruber's approach to the commenting abyss.

FWIW, Jake, your compulsion to reply to each comment was clearly noticeable when I first started reading here; it made it feel more “open,” so well done.

95% spam/malicious is a horrible S/N ratio; I had no idea it was that bad. Probably still a way better rate than email, not that comparing blog comments to email is very useful.

The sweet spot for comments is for “niche”/small-audience blogs. If a blog gets too popular, or if the content appeals broadly enough, it becomes more difficult to have a coherent conversation, whether it's between author and commenters, or among the commenters themselves. That conversation is the value-add of blog comments: new insights, clarification, or just a feeling of mini-community (I've seen all three here, for example). High volume of comments tends to wash out all of that, and increases the cognitive load on the blog author.

My point about Twitter needs refinement and might not be possible. Because there is limited (if any) threading, you'd have to make some assumptions beyond the easy stuff, like tracking retweets and short links pointing to your post. Rich mentioned backlinks, which I need to read up on to understand.

It's the @ replies that are to you, e.g. @theappslab, but have no solid reference to your post, that are difficult. We might work on it as a side project.

Large sites, you are spot-on – newspaper sites and dilbertblog, heck even /., comments are both boring and predictable, even though blog content is interesting. /. comes up a little with karma point system, but not much.

Many of the oracle blogs also suffer from ignoring comments, at least that's how it looks to those whose comments don't get published. Maybe there's corporate paranoia at work.

Twitter as a comment mechanism? I dunno, somehow that strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. Then again, I just don't get twitter. Then again, anything that requires configuration and plugins to look sensible is going to put me off every time I switch devices, which is multiple times a day. I sure don't get:

jkuramot i'm so late to the party, but @posterous rocks, that is all 8 minutes ago reply

JoeSchueller Was so obvious why GMail was so much better than everything else. #Buzz, not so much. Is Google the next M$, or am I just missing it?

I also don't get reactions and polls. The latter is probably because I took too much statistics in college, I just immediately see problems rather than solutions.

Blogging is inherently asymmetrical between posting and comments. When if first started, my initial reaction was visualizing a bunch of people in a many-cornered room, all emitting air or other bodily expulsions into the corners. Communication requires some kind of back and forth – I disagree with Paul's first sentence, blogging was a big step backwards in that sense, all the comment stuff is a hack to replace the group/networking things that came before. Nowadays, sometimes even the best technical blogs seem to suffer from not knowing if they are making any difference. Like with talk radio, arrogance, the belief irregardless of the facts that people care what you are saying, rules over feedback, because popularity is the wrong metric, and even the feedback suffers from arrogance.

Overriding all of that, how the economics of blogging and tweeting shake out will be the final determinant. Google's killer app is not a search engine, it is an advertising agency.

Twitter, on the other hand, is much less reply-oriented for me.

Oh, and thanks for popping by