Get Your Own Blog

Jason Calacanis is back to blogging, and he wrote something a couple of weeks ago that got me thinking again about a conversation I had recently about blog comments. It’s been on my mind for some time, but Jason’s post really hit home for me, so I thought it was time to share.

Some time before the word blog was coined, I was using the Internet to keep up with what other people thought of things. I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled onto USENET. As an information junkie, I simply couldn’t get enough of it. After setting it aside for a while, I got back online in 1994. I set up a dialup account at staug.com, and the first thing I did was download the list of USENET groups. It took hours over a dialup connection. I didn’t do a lot of posting, but I did a lot of reading, mostly about science and philosophy. A little bit about religion and politics.

I’m not sure when I discovered blogs exactly, but I spent the next six to eight years building a bunch of websites for fun and profit and I spent almost all of my time reading what other programmers, developers, designers, and writers were doing online. It was during this time that I stumbled onto the work of people I still follow today - Dave Winer, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Chris Pirillo, Dan Benjamin, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Robert Scoble.

In 2002, I scaled back my business a little to focus on teaching again, but by 2006 I was back to reading blogs voraciously and around that time I discovered five more bloggers whose work I still follow today - Merlin Mann, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Seth Godin.

All of the people I mentioned above have allowed comments on their blog posts at one point, and that was cool, but eventually the comment sections became places I avoided because of name calling and other anti-social behavior. I think it’s just too easy for anyone to visit a blog, say whatever pops into their head, and take off. Fortunately, there was a better way. This all seems so obious now, but bloggers soon started linking to posts by other bloggers in responsed on their own blogs. Not long after, some blogs started supporting pingbacks and/or trackbacks, which allowed those converstaions to be linked together in a way that made following the thread of conversation easier.

That’s how the Internet works. -Merlin Mann

The experience was fantastic, but the sense of community was even better.

If you want to be an anomaly, you’ve gotta act like one. -Gary Vaynerchuck

There is one blog that pulled me back into blog comments. Generally, the comment section there is an anomaly. I learn as much - or more - from the comments than I do from the posts. But it’s not always fun and games. Every once in a while, I can tell from the topic of the post that I will want to avoid the comments. One such discussion left me so aggravated that I reached out to the author to encourage him to keep at it, but I also reminded him of that it was not his responsibility to host a place where I can say whatever I want. I’m glad some bloggers give readers the option to share their opinions, but at a certain point, it becomes clear that the discussion should move elsewhere.

and that place should be, if you ask me, your own blog.