Comments on: Blog awareness

By: vernaculo

vernaculo — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 03:39:48 +0000

Starting with a definition of information as intellectual property, then proceeding to “…(information is costly to create)”? Sunlight is probably the most powerful information we encounter. And the cost of creating it is beyond our ability to reckon, on one hand, while on the other it pours through our lives freely every day. Unless by information you mean solely those recieved particles of abstract symbolism created by human beings… – The blog format is used by a lot of people to do things not quite in the agreed-upon standard. Mark Wood’s ::: wood s lot ::: is 4 years old today. If anybody’s standing in a larger-than-blog arena and still using this technology he is.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 20:24:25 +0000

I started reading blogs when I realised where my favourite Usenet posters had disappeared to Yup. Often wondered if there is a measurable switch of usenet users to these – comparatively noiseless – blogs.

By: eszter

eszter — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:42:54 +0000

I disagree that a blog that allows comments but doesn’t get many is the same as a blog that doesn’t allow comments at all. For me, it’s the option of commenting that draws me to sites that allow comments. Once a blog doesn’t allow for comments anymore, it’s really not that much different from a traditional outlet.. except that the material did not have to be approved by an editor. But if you have no input from either editors or readers on the content of a post then there is very little public quality control available. Sure, you can send an email to the author, but that’s private. You can also address the post on your own blog – assuming you have one – but that won’t necessarily be visible to others reading the post so your entry is pretty much in isolation of the original writing. BTW John, you have raised several issues in this post already, you could easily write a new entry on them.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 20:57:03 +0000

Yeah, hm, and Body and Soul didn’t have comments back then either, another one of my first blogs. And Instapundit, which I have never read but still a lot of people seem to think of it as an important blog. And there was no such thing as “Trackbacks” then, I’m pretty sure, except when they were added in by hand. The community-building feature of blogs definitely existed—that is what I remember drawing me in—but it consisted more in people cross-linking and cross-referencing in the bodies of their posts.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 20:44:25 +0000

John—when I started reading blogs, 2 or so years ago, it seems like it was uncommon for a blog to have comments. At least the ones I started reading—Calpundit, This Modern World, TPM —were commentless (Calpundit later added comments and I was initially happy about it, but less so as time went on)—I think for this reason, comments strike me as something extra for a blog to have. I think maybe Matt Yglesias’ was the first blog I read regularly that had comments. In the case of Crooked Timber comments are definitely an integral part of the site—but I evaluate group blogs a little differently than I do blogs. I can’t think of any group blog I’ve read that did not have comments, and have them as a very important feature of the site.

By: eudoxis

eudoxis — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 16:09:15 +0000

I also have the suspicion that there is a large population of internet users who aren’t aware when they’re reading blogs. Readers are drawn in by a link and go on from there. A lot of blog content shows up in go*gle searches, making the blogosphere rather unavoidable. I suspect that the (artificial) finding of limited readership is because of the tendency to define blogs in an exlusive way. Blogs are as varied as the individuals who write them and shared features such as chronological order of posts and hyperlinks are shared by a massive number of personal web pages.

By: Eimear N� Mh�al�id

Eimear N� Mh�al�id — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:29:35 +0000

I started reading blogs when I realised where my favourite Usenet posters had disappeared to.

By: dave heasman

dave heasman — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 09:46:17 +0000

Robot Wisdom was an early link-driven, no-comments blog. Actually called itself a “weblog” too, in, I think, 1996. It’s defunct now, a shame, he was good on James Joyce. More personal near-blogs from ‘96 were a chap from Alabama calling himself “Bokonon”, and Eve Andersson, later of ArsDigita fame. Phil Greenspun, too. Apart from the comments, there’s not much difference between a web diary, a blog, or indeed a web-cam, is there?

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 03:09:29 +0000

“I rarely read blogs without comments threads,” I read them all. Not really, but Farber’s Amygdala, or Schmitt’s Decembrist, or Beyerstein or Sawicky don’t get a lot of comments, tho they have threads available. That makes them not so different from Marshall and Juan Cole. Use an RSS feeder, and read Atrios and DKos in the pane. Come to CT via the “Recent Comments” feed. Wish more blogs used it. Obviously Drum and DKos are out of control. No, take that back, they are just a large party. Zizka and others bitch too much, you can speed read thru the dreck. Some threads suck at 20, some are great at 200. I would never dream of commenting at Weatherson’s or Quiggin’s blog, but do here when I shouldn’t. I am trying to give confidence to the lurkers.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 02:37:28 +0000

A point raised by Eszter earlier, and mentioned by Michael, is that a blog isn’t really a blog without comments. OTOH, if the number of commenters grows beyond a certain limit (roughly 100 comments per post) the whole process degenerates into Usenet-like noise. It seems to me that this will offset tendencies to concentration that are apparent in the blog world. The top 10 or 20 blogs will attract lots of readers (by definition) but won’t allow comments or will have out-of-control comments threads. That means the more interested readers will tend to look elsewhere which creates room for more diversity. This is certainly true for me – I rarely read blogs without comments threads, which excludes most of the top 10 on the usual lists. I’d be interested to hear from others on this point.

By: mdog

mdog — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 02:30:00 +0000

I learned about blogs reading somewhere about Bagdad Burning (www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com) Now I scan my Kinja digest (www.kinja.com/user/MarshallKirkpatrick) daily to review headlines of my favorite blogs. Commenting, etc. has long been used in the Indymedia world as well. http://www.indymedia.org

By: yabonn

yabonn — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 22:56:31 +0000

I remember the first time i tried to see what these “blogs” were, i fell on instapundit and sullivan. Happily, i nevertheless gave it another try, a few months after. Heh.

By: Greg Hunter

Greg Hunter — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 21:58:03 +0000

I cannot remember when I found blogs, but yours (CT) was one of the first and your links provided some other sites that I continue to read today. I live in Dayton, Ohio and due to consolidation of newspaper and media, there is a general lack of news, only groupthink. Blogs allow people with curious minds to expand it’s exposure to ideas. Thank you CT for your efforts and I feel like I have been freed from the Matrix.

By: MaryLou Corrigan

MaryLou Corrigan — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 21:16:38 +0000

I’m probably somewhat atypical of most blog readers (age 62, retired, worked in corporate America, female). I first became aware that blogs even existed during the Dem primaries when I became a daily visitor to the John Edwards campaign blog. I followed links from there to Daily Kos, and from there became aware of Talking Points Memo, Calpundit, Matt Yglesias. I pretty much started reading comments and blogrolls, and picking the ones that were well-written and made good points. Now I have set of blogs that I read daily, and some that I check several times a week (eg, Fafblog). One good aspect: the chance for somewhat isolated people (eg, retirees) to paricipate in a community of informed, articulate people plus learn something new. For example, I read Brad DeLong to get somewhat educated about economics.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 18:31:17 +0000

The distinction between weblogs and “traditional” web sites is further blurred by sites that use a blog engine to publish their content but disable the community-building features (commenting and pinging) that make blogs so much fun. Such is the case with the Gawker Media blogs (Gizmodo, Wonkette, etc.), and I doubt many non-bloggers would recognize these sites as part of the blogosphere.