2004 Rehash Alert, Meta Alert

Christian Heilmann takes people to task for conducting debates on Twitter. The irony about this is the post that triggered these debates concludes thus:

I don't have comments on my blog but I'd love to hear from you if you feel the same way (or not). Tweet at me, discuss on HN/etc, or pick some other method and I'd be happy to chat about it, just not over a beer :)

The double-irony is that Christian’s blog also doesn’t have comments. (I thought it did before, maybe that’s temporary.)

Anyway, this is an age-old debate about blogs and comments, and I sure know the pain of maintaining comments in the face of endless blogspam (see below). So while I certainly wish more blogs would have comments, I’m sympathetic to those which don’t. All I’m saying is the conversation will happen more on other channels in the absence of blog comments. Some posts are notable enough to float to the top of HN, where there’s a built-in comments mechanism. But for the rest, Twitter is going to be the place.

(Incidentally, Josh Schachter’s TinyThread was quite a neat idea for offlining a conversation. Not ideal , e.g. everything’s designed around being able to tweet comments, but the basic concept had potential. Never took off though.)