Do Blogs Need Comments?

Posted on April 30, 2005

Do blogs need comments? Some blogs have them and some do not. Some blogs have filtered comments and some do not. There are no comments on Bloggers Blog so far but we still begin and continue discussions taking place across blogs and the Internet. BusinessWeek's Blogspotting reports that they are filtering comments for profanity, libel, etc:

Yesterday we asked if we could let the comments run unchecked, as so many blog sites do. The response was quick and emphatic. No. The magazine doesn't want to run the chance that even a tiny minority of the postings will be racist, hateful, pornographic, libelous. So the vast majority of readers, who can be trusted to be responsible, must post their thoughts and then wait for Heather or me to give them the ok. It's a pain and I'm sorry about it. But it's not going to change as long as this site is part of BW.

BusinessWeek's blogs probably need a filter or spammers will eventually find them. They are really running a blog and a "forum" at the same time and most good forums have moderators to remove spam and problem posts. Their only risk is that they might lose some comments from impatient posters who leave to find other blogs to post on. However, readers might appreciate the fact that spam and profanity posts have been removed and choose to visit more frequently. Does a blog even need comments to be a blog? That's debatable. The top-ranked blog, Boing Boing, just points at Technorati's cosmos for discussion. Rose O'Donnell had removed comments from her blog at one point because of obnoxious posters, but she appears to have added comments back to her blog as part of her relaunch at Rosie.com.