Comments, Feedback?
According to Breitbart.com (via the main mb page), the Washington Post had to take a mulligan after opening up one of its blogs for comments. The comments were fast and literally furious.
Opening your blog up to comments can be risky business: you run the risk of being flamed or spammed. Many blog platforms offer the option of approving comments before they’re posted, but spam is still a problem. Just check out the comments on author Ayelet Waldman’s now-defunct blog.
For your blog, I found some sources on how to combat commenter spam, including some comprehensive FAQ’s from WordPress and the general war on comment spam, via the USC Annenberg Online Journalism review.
Meanwhile, short of censoring useless comments (which blogger Wendy McClure does as policy), the best method is learning how to be a good commenter. You might not be able to stop the flamers but at least you can avoid getting dragged into a “U SUK” “NO U SUK” battle within your own comments blog. Lifehacker has a helpful guide to weblog comments. And for those of you who can’t help but get caught up in the passion, you can commiserate with blogger Koviken, who describes herself as “not a good commenter.” (Warning: the post in reference to her commenting skills is about a fairly incendiary topic so if you don’t want to risk writing your own comments-area-thesis, you may want to avoid.)
Another point of being a good commenter is that it is its own version of networking. If you post thoughtful, well-written comments on a blog run by a writer you admire, they may start a correspondence with you. Just don’t post 100 thoughtful, well-written comments a day.
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Bonus: blog-related but otherwise unrelated news: Nobody ever said that blogging is a lucrative business. But one unexpected genre of sites is attracting advertisers with deep pockets: science blogs (NYT.)
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