Rosie O'Donnell Removes Blog Comments

Posted on April 3, 2005

Rosie O'Donnell has removed comments from her blog. The comments on her blog were starting to get out of hand and some also include links to porn websites. Rosie told BroadWayWorld.com why she removed comments from her blog in a recent interview:

We took comments off because it was getting to be ridiculous. I get great responses, but then you know it just takes one idiot, writing "you're fat, you're a dyke, you're a fat dyke, you're gay, and you're fat and you're gay, and you're also a dyke" and it gets out of control. There were no limits on how much they could post, so they could just post pages of that, or put links up to porno sites or whatever. Finally, we just decided to make it comment free.

Rosie's decision raises the question as to whether comments are a necessary part of a weblog. Some websites allow comments to be posted directly onto their blog. While others outsource to services like Haloscan. Other websites like Boing Boing just point at Technorati for additional discussion. For example, Technorati shows a list of blog posts that contain a link to the Rosie O'Donnell interview mentioned above. Comments posted directly onto a blog's website are likely to diminish in popularity as weblogs become more popular. As blogs continue to increase in number and become more popular then it also becomes more likely that the comments posted are increasingly of the kind that bloggers will not want.