Well-known blogger and Yahoo staffer Russell Beattie found the demands of multiple channels of information so demanding that he has turned off comments in his blog, along with deleting hundreds of existing comments.
Is it a blog without comments? Beattie thinks so, and called his decision to shut down commenting a return “to old-school blogging.”
While the vast majority of bloggers get a limited number of comments, if any, Beattie was an exception. His site represented the views of someone who, like noted blogger Jeremy Zawodny, worked inside one of the big Internet powers, but spoke with his voice and not the company’s.
That drew interest and commentary. So much that Beattie has packed in the comment functionality, and cited reasons why:
Comments were taking up too much time to manage, and too many mental cycles as I processed them in addition to emails, IMs, SMS, Phone Calls, etc. I’ve gotten over 680 comments since Jan. 1st. That’s an average of 20 a day – though sometimes many more – and I get at least 2 or 3 anonymous idiots per post as well, and the occasional spammer. Dealing with the comments takes time, and considering that I’m disorganized already, it’s something that needed to be cut.
For some reason, Beattie went a step beyond turning off comments. He deleted all the existing commentary on all of his blog entries. “All of the old ones, and no more new ones. All gone bye bye, he said.
Trashing those old comments could be problematic, as the Mobile Jones blog pointed out:
Did it occur to Russ that over the few years that others have been contributing to his blog that they might have linked to that content which no longer exists? I wonder how many broken links and therefore broken context to posts on other blogs have resulted from this innvocation (sic) of the delete key. Bummer for that group. Bummer for those conversations.
Likewise, BBC Backstage developer Ben Metcalfe indicated why it would be more desirable to leave a comment on a blog rather than creating a post on one’s own blog to link to Beattie’s, the model he suggests going forward:
Sure, you can comment’ on a blog post by writing your own blog post – but not everyone has a blog. And those who do often have themed’ blogs where a certain level of on-topicness needs to be maintained.
Can a blog be too successful? For one person with interests and work responsibilities beyond the blog, certainly. Beattie makes a good point on the multitude of ways people can be on the receiving end of information.
But going back to the question of what makes a blog, comments seem to be the deciding factor. Taking them off a blog turns it into something that looks like it belongs on a different Yahoo service altogether.
Maybe Beattie will rethink the topic in the future. Perhaps he could adopt the Gawker model of only permitting comments by invitation only. That would eliminate issues like comment spam and other anonymous posting hijinks.
Now the question is, which of the more popular blog owners, well-established in PageRank, decides to follow Beattie’s example next?
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
