Andy's Blog

A case for not rejecting comments on your blog

On the EDS Next Big Thing Blog, Charlie Bess wrote about the Austin Blogging Conference, and asked "What would you like to see covered in this blog that would peak your interest and desire to carry on a deeper conversation?". I decided to answer this question, by commenting on the EDS blog. Here is what I wrote a few days ago:

"My biggest problem with this blog is that "the future" is so amorphous and hard to hold on to. Saying things like "In the future, we'll have robots to take care of our robots" is great and all, but it isn't something that I'm going to put a lot of passion into discussing.

I think the focus needs to be a little bit nearer term. Not necessarily immediate, but I would say like 1 to 2 years out, tops.

In general, I would like to see EDS get a lot more aggressive with blogging. Take some more risks. A lot of our vendors (Sun, Microsoft, BMC) and customers (GM) are doing a lot more with blogging than we are. I think that's a shame, and we should be working our tails off to catch up, and then get out ahead.

-Andy."

But, if you were to go and look at that post now, you won't find my comment, because EDS's timid attempt at blogging relies on comment moderation. I can't say that I 100% disagree with them -- there is a lot of worry in business about legal liability, and comment SPAM is actually a pretty big problem.

But in this case, I don't agree with censoring my comment. But this is what makes blogging so great -- I can just take this comment, and post it on my own blog. I could have just posted this to my internal blog at work, but since I intended this comment to be displayed on the Internet, I have decided to post it to my public blog.

Ultimately, the EDS Next Big Thing blog loses out -- because it has lost a vital piece of converstation, which I will now be steering over towards my blog. My whole "life thesis" is that being open ultimately wins out over being closed, and that really seems to apply to blog comments.

UPDATE: My comment appears now, after about a 2 day wait.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: EDS, Blogging

Posted by andyr at November 4, 2005 05:37 PM