Friday, July 11, 2003
Weblogs don’t need commentsWeblogs are different from threaded discussion groups or mailing lists. They allow you to carry out a distributed discussion where the thread can be assembled remotely using an analysis tool such as Technorati. The advantage is that weblogs are personal, down to the look and feel of an individual blog, with all the functionality of a threaded discussion implicitly available.
To add comments within someone else’s weblog is surely a retrograde step? In true trackback style the comments box should pull up a list of references to the post from Technorati – with a box that posts to your own blog or signs you up to start one.
I think this is wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between trackbacks and comments. If I just want to leave some pithy remark about someone’s jocular ramblings, my own site isn’t the place to do it (assuming I even have a site, of course).
The only way to have this make any sense would be to mirror the entire conversation on each of the people’s sites who are participating in it – but then how do you get the initial post that started it? Copy and paste onto your own site? Seems like that is the retrograde step to me.