The reason i ask is i rarely post comments to Blogger sites, because i am not a user. The forced registration is just not cool, something i have blogged on before. The latest blog i can’t post too is Mythinformation of Sewing, Patterns & Production
Why am i looking at a sewing blog? Because i am interested in open source business models beyond software.
So what about Blogger? Well i never post to Simon Phipps. Why he uses a tool with a a forced identity system that doesn’t even work all the time is beyond me. But each to his own I guess. But how many interesting comments is Simon missing? If you’re a Blogger user that chooses to only allow comments from other Blogger users that’s like not allowing deep linking or something. It’s fine if your blog is a broadcast, but not if you want a feedback loop.
Of course I appreciate that comment spam is a big problem for many blog platforms, or in MT’s case, trackback spam (I would like get hold of the people responsible for the Texas Holdem poker spam and give each of them multiple papercuts on their eyeballs and then pour salt, lemon, tabasco and tequila into their bleeding corneas. now rinse…. and repeat…). Registration can significantly reduce the problem, but i dont want to have to register before i post to your blog. That is a barrier to entry that winds me up. Sometimes you don’t want to do a trackback. Or post anonymously and enter details in the body text.
Even MSN Spaces users, which you would expect to be fully Passport protected, seem more open to comments.
I can’t help thinking that Scoble makes a solid point about how Google is held to different standards than MS, even when it does things that freaked people out badly when Microsoft tried them. Ah The Power Of Context. If Simon Phipps was using MSN Spaces he would have migrated a long time ago.
What is Blogger’s detault? And are Blogger users having less rich interactions ? What do you think?
Fraxas says:
March 8, 2005 at 4:34 pm
Speaking as someone with a blogspot blog, I don’t have any problem making comments on blogger blogs. So I can’t answer that part of your question.
I *can* tell you why I use Blogger, though — it’s incredibly easy to do. If I’d already had my own domain, maybe I’d have installed MT instead of creating a blogger account, but I don’t have to deal with comment spam. I don’t have to deal with trackback spam. I don’t have to deal with referrer spam. I can quickly and easily find the blogs of people who comment on my site, and write back to them.
Does this mean I get fewer comments? Probably. But I don’t have time to say half the things I want to on my (or other people’s) blogs, so what’s the chance I’d actually read all the comments I got if I was popular? Also, a bit of a barrier to entry probably increases the quality of the posts I do get, too, since you’ll only bother to register if you really, really want to say something. Or if you’re already a blogger user, I guess.
Fundamentally, it’s a trade of reach for quality of conversation. I’m happy to be a part of the long tail.
Simon Phipps says:
March 8, 2005 at 4:51 pm
If you dislike me you presumably just hate Tim Bray, Doc Searls and Jonathan Schwartz who have no comment system at all? At least I have two places to leave comments on my personal blog, I’m sorry you don’t want to use either of them (you don’t have to have a Blogger blog to post, you just need to authenticate with them, like with TypeKey).
I have been using Blogger for my blog since before they were trendy. I found that off-host comment systems were unreliable so moved to Blogger’s when they introduced it, and for a long time it was trouble free. I had to make my blog comments registered-only because of blog spam waves that had me spending all day deleting crud.
Anyway, what’s your proposal to allow high-traffic blogs to still accept comments? Right now nothing works apart from registration – otherwise you have to manually delete the crud or administer your own server. My current choices are no comments or registration.
Meanwhile, Blogger is indeed delinquent in not having any commitment to fighting the effects of comment spam and seems to have introduced no new capabilities (blogs.sun.com does a much better job via Roller) and I’m itching to migrate – there’s just nothing to migrate to without becoming a blog software geek.
McD says:
March 8, 2005 at 4:53 pm
The “Google = MS WHERE autolink = smarttags” idea
needs to be commented upon:
1. Scoble works for MS.
2. MS intended to add the feature into the browser
and limit the users right/ability to ebnable the feature. I’d say MS has such a market advantage to link the OS and it’s software to their services (which compete w/Google) that they cannot be allowed
to apply such leverage to the users enviroment.
3. Google’s toolbar is added by the user (not shipped with every new PC) and the user must decide to request the page be modified with the new tags and the tags are limited to addresses, books w/ ISBN and not much else.
Please research the technology and try the toolbar and decide if it’s a true violation of the content provider’s material or a tempest in a teapot.
Google’s marketshare with the toolbar must be < .01% and this issue is overhyped by a lot of people that should know better.
The web is all about automating the indexing and access to information. Innovation cannot suffer such politically innane backlashesd when their are so many pressing issues around free speech and digital content rights that deserve better ombudsmen.
Thanks for the opportunity to reach another 10 people with my point of view.
McD
A Donkey on the Edge says:
February 14, 2006 at 10:46 am
Blogger, spam, and why I wrote my first blogging app
In days of yore, before Donkey was published using movabletype, I wrote an application to publish this blog. Like most of the software I’ve created, it was pretty rubbish, but in fairness, it did support three growing blogs well enough…
len says:
February 15, 2006 at 2:55 pm
“Ah The Power Of Context.”
Ah the power of using artificial contexts to hide origins, disguise facts, promote trends to advance hidden agendas and otherwise obscure the history we rely on to learn by experience.
According to WikiPedia, the term ‘tipping point’ doesn’t originate in epidemiology as Gladwell claims in the article you cite. It was the term used to describe ‘white flight’ from all white neighborhoods when black families moved into them in the 1960s. It was then resemanticized several times with the latest one being a sort of pop semiotics for marketing executives who want to sound smarter than they are.
And now, just a ‘tutti fruiti’ was absorbed and new semantics applied by the music machine, yet another term has been appropriated by the ‘mavens’ of pop psychology to spread by the ‘newly connected but not very bright’ bloggers, and sold as something new and different when it is old wine in a new bottle.
james governor says:
February 17, 2006 at 10:25 am
ah len. QED… no?
something new and different old wine new bottle – a different context. thus proving the point. 🙂