The Economist carried a story on Blogging. And the bottomline was:
Blogging is just another word for having conversations
Tom Raftery wrote a few days back that in his blog that Blogging was starting to become monologous as some of the most popular bloggers closed down/moderate comments.
And this is what Guy Kawasaki had to say regarding comments:
7. Acknowledge and respond to commenters. Only good things can happen when you read all the comments in your blog and respond to them. It makes commenters return to your blog. This, in turn, makes commenters feel like they are part of your blog's community which makes them tell more people to read your blog.
It is rather ironical that comments are not "wanted" anymore, because in the early days of blogging, comments were an indication of how popular a blog was! With the advent of feed readers and trackbacks, popular bloggers have decided to shut down a window; one crucial channel of communication, blaming it on the trolls. Added to that, we have spams, word-verifications, comment moderations resulting ultimately in conversation-killers. Sad and sorry state, indeed. As Tom Raftery rightly asks:
how can we now seriously evangelise the benefits of having comments enabled when some of the most prominent bloggers have theirs locked down?
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