At last…comments. As regular readers know I’ve had several concerns about comments on the blog, technical and substantive and have never subscribed to this nonsense that to be “real” a blog has to have comments. But, in the past few years the technical side of things seems to be getting much better. I no longer hear/see horror stories about blogs crashing from the comment function or being overrun with comment spam. I get enough emails touting Ambien and Viagra as it is, though I’ve never understood why someone would take both.
I’m still not sure on the substantive side. On most education blogs there are hardly any comments at all and on other blogs many of the comments seem to quickly devolve into inappropriate language or personal attacks. That’s an issue for me because this blog carries Education Sector’s brand on it in exchange for hosting and technical support and so forth. And we don’t have, and I don’t have, the time to moderate comments as most other organizationally affiliated blogs do. If that turns out to be an issue we’ll have to pull this experiment back. The new comment policy outlines what’s in and what’s out.
For now though I’ve long wanted to see if there was an appetite for a more interactive forum so as of now there are comments on the blog toward that end. This has been in the works a while and it should all be good to go but please bear with us if we still need to iron out any kinks. And, if you see things that are inappropriate please drop a line so we can get them taken care of.
So, talk amongst yourselves.
I have no comment.
If you want a forum, have a forum. The software is different. I agree that blogs don’t require comments and given your constraints, I think you should avoid them. Of course, if you didn’t have them, I couldn’t say this, but that’s a price you can live with.
Welcome to Web 2.0. 🙂
Joe Williams turns out to be a little taller than I expected.
– Manny Ramirez
Great choice to add comments. I’ll post away.
Congratulations on taking this important step, Andrew. Dialogue is better than monologue. You’ve just made a good blog much better.
To Esteban.
Why do you thin that dialogue is so much better, if you ask me it depends on the situation.