Last year I started to use Google reader to follow things in the news, and to keep up with what other folks I knew thought interesting. This has been quite the mind sharpening exercise, if only because the amount I read went up from roughly 100 pages to about 200 daily. As a result, I've learned more than I ever expected; certainly more that was useful then the entirety of my schooling. Also, through the comment system there, I've gained a lot of clarity of thought through the argumentation facilitated there. However, the more one reads and writes, the more one wants to; it's a vicious cycle that ends with one being a pompous windbag at worst, and an opinion leader at best (and sometimes both!) With that in mind, I've decided to descend even further into said madness and become the worst kind of degenerate scum; a blogger.
When I thought about it, I realized that I'd forgotten what the word "blog" even meant; I suspect nearly everyone has. I think it was a log on the web (shortened weblog), but I think journal always a bit more apt. Digression aside, I realized there was a choice ahead of me; that being how I wanted to go about it. There are two main distinctions in blogging, and I had to come down on one side or the other, and it all has to do with comments.
The traditional blog has comments below each post; and roughly anyone can post fairly easily. This has lots of drawbacks however, the main one being the excessive amount of moderation required due to rampant spam and shitposting. A blog has to become very large before enough people care about it to have anyone insightful in the bunch commenting. Until then, you have to deal with the depressing prospect of either no comments, bad/useless comments, and spam being the only comments at all. If you've ever seen the comments on youtube videos, this is what I'm talking about.
As you must have surmised by now, I am not too keen on that idea. I built this site around the principles that involve me doing as little work as possible; Nearly everything is just dynamically generated based on files I just unceremoniously dumped in some directory. Also, due to running a BB for a while (and doing so again), I hate spam comments with an extreme passion. Though I know such can be kept under control (I have administrated wordpress blogs for folks), I know it's more work than not having to deal with it. So, I looked at a decidedly different model; disallowing comments completely.
This is not a decision to be taken lightly, as comments can add lots of value; Indeed some blogs have comments that are far more insightful than the original post! However, this does not mean one cannot have a good site without them; on the contrary, most web 1.0 "internet celebrities" basically just posted essays and corresponded by email. Some would post up some of the interesting mail (or hilarious hate mail), and thus preserve the spirit of comments. Also, with the advent of things like Google reader, folks can still make meaningful comments amongst themselves. I've found that commenting on stuff only your friends are seeing decidedly stops spam and shitposting.
So, I decided I'd take the old-school approach, and tell everyone to just mail me, comment in the forum, or get on irc if they want to talk about it. Hopefully this will force me to write higher quality posts that don't reek of USI like all mine so far.
