Blogging - to comment or not to comment?
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Ever since blogging began there has been a debate over whether or not business bloggers should allow others to add comments to their blog posts. This has recently become extremely topical to us, as we engage in debate over our new Reactive blog.
Weighing in on the pro side of comments is the Web 2.0 community at large. The entire ethos of Web 2.0 is enabling the community to create content, it is the take-up of this ethos that have driven the success of community-content sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and MySpace. In particular, Wikipedia’s content is continuously evolving, and is the result of the collective knowledge of all of its visitors. Enabling comments is, without doubt, the ‘right thing to do’ to stay on the good side of Web 2.0.
Another key argument for enabling comments is the business benefits of hearing what the public (and customers) have to say. This has been used effectively by many companies for research purposes, effectively the blog becomes an unpaid focus-group (presuming you can attract enough comment to get a broad sample).
However, there is plenty of argument for the con side of allowing comments. The most obvious gut reaction being: ‘what if people say bad things about us?’ This may sound over-protective, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where a disgruntled staff member or a competitor starts posting negative comments. If you allow comments on your blog, it is considered extremely poor form to then moderate those comments. Although another downside of comments is comment-spam, automated (or manual) entries promoting commercial sites. These are a tiresome annoyance, and lower the credibility of your blog in the eyes of the visitors, and also in the eyes of Google.
Seth Godin caused a stir recently when he removed comments from his blog. He removed them primarily because he didn’t have time to read (let alone respond) to all of the comments, but not every blogger is fortunate enough to have the number of readers that Seth does.
Clearly there are no right or wrong answers, and here at Reactive the jury is still out. We launched the Reactive blog without comments, but soon we are going to enable them for a trial period. Hopefully anyone reading this will weigh into the conversation, and let me know their thoughts on whether we should allow comments or not. Be nice :)
Tim O'Neill, Managing Director, United Kingdom
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Weighing in on the pro side of comments is the Web 2.0 community at large. The entire ethos of Web 2.0 is enabling the community to create content, it is the take-up of this ethos that have driven the success of community-content sites such as Wikipedia, Flickr and MySpace. In particular, Wikipedia’s content is continuously evolving, and is the result of the collective knowledge of all of its visitors. Enabling comments is, without doubt, the ‘right thing to do’ to stay on the good side of Web 2.0.
Another key argument for enabling comments is the business benefits of hearing what the public (and customers) have to say. This has been used effectively by many companies for research purposes, effectively the blog becomes an unpaid focus-group (presuming you can attract enough comment to get a broad sample).
However, there is plenty of argument for the con side of allowing comments. The most obvious gut reaction being: ‘what if people say bad things about us?’ This may sound over-protective, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where a disgruntled staff member or a competitor starts posting negative comments. If you allow comments on your blog, it is considered extremely poor form to then moderate those comments. Although another downside of comments is comment-spam, automated (or manual) entries promoting commercial sites. These are a tiresome annoyance, and lower the credibility of your blog in the eyes of the visitors, and also in the eyes of Google.
Seth Godin caused a stir recently when he removed comments from his blog. He removed them primarily because he didn’t have time to read (let alone respond) to all of the comments, but not every blogger is fortunate enough to have the number of readers that Seth does.
Clearly there are no right or wrong answers, and here at Reactive the jury is still out. We launched the Reactive blog without comments, but soon we are going to enable them for a trial period. Hopefully anyone reading this will weigh into the conversation, and let me know their thoughts on whether we should allow comments or not. Be nice :)
Tim O'Neill, Managing Director, United Kingdom
Labels: Web Culture and Trends
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