With the huge launches of news weblogs like Gawker Media’s Sploid and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, you’d think that the medium they’re utilizing would actually be utilized. Weblogs are all about two-way communication between writers and readers, but commenting features on these two sites are noticeably absent. What happened here was that they wanted to exploit the hype and media attention surrounding weblogs for their gain, without all the aftertaste of reader opinions. What a waste.
Denton’s other sites don’t have comments, so this post isn’t specifically directed towards him. He sees weblogs as another outlet for media advertising dollars, so more power to him. Unfortunately, Arianna was pimping the weblog medium so much that I fully expected reader interaction on The Huffington Post, but I was completely incorrect. She had an opportunity to really move weblogs into the limelight with a way for readers to directly talk to politicos, but she squandered it.
Hilary Rosen recently discussed how DRM is craptacular for her and her iPod which is totally hypocritical because Rosen was the head of the RIAA when she forced Jobs into a DRMd music store.
A growing number of blogs are blowing up with comments about how big of a hypocrite she is, and how she now realizes what we’re thinking about when we used to hear her speak, however she will never hear any of this feedback. If there were a way to leave comments on the blog entry itself, she might actually gain some insight into what it means to be a consumer in a digital music world. But, Arianna squandered the entire medium, and now her site is just another frequently updated site without the added benefit of comments to spice it up. I’ll pass.
It seems as though Google has found comments on at least one of the Huffington Post entries, but Arianna and Hilary must have had an “oh shit” moment when hundreds of comments came pouring in essentially ripping her a new one and shut it all down.
About Mike Rundle
Oh boy, I was thinking the exact same thing today. It really bugs me that some of these higher profile sites are so closed when it comes to community and so behind the curve technology-wise.
I thought about writing a full post about Rosen’s comments, but didn’t have time. Del.icio.us to the rescue, this allowed me to say a bit, draw some light to it and move on.
But I’d much rather have dropped a comment directly to the post.
Actually, there’s a world of difference between what we know today as “blogs” and the original web logs that collected news. Drudge, Robot Wisdom, Tabloid.net and other such early news sites never had comments. That’s a recent invention, and it’s not a useful thing for breaking-news sites.
And I’m sure Instapundit would agree that you can’t have open comments on a high-traffic blog today unless you’ve got somebody watching those comments night & day. Spam, death threats and other such fun is the stuff you can expect if you’ve got a lot of people coming around your site.
I work with Nick Denton (disclaimer) although I’ve been running web sites for 9 years before that. But I don’t have comments on my own personal blogs, because I don’t have the time to watch over them. I wish I did. It is nice to comment on a blog post, like I’m doing right now.
So their are a few question the Huff. Post needs to ask themselves. (1) Is it a news article that does not require comment or(2) is it a commentary that incites comments. I am speaking of the Hillay Rosen iPOD comments found here:
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/steve-jobs-let-.html)
This was a commentary that should be responded to even if it takes her two days to respond. She asked questions and wondered why she is the only one asking the questions. Obviously from the comments others left she is in a very small minority. She should have to respond. She attacked; she did not report a news event.
What bothers me about her article is that she talks about the iPod and Apple iTunes Music Store as if they’re holding users captive, when the truth is, the iPod is the world’s #1 MP3 player because people like it and like using it. Nobody is forcing people to go out and buy 40GB iPods and purchase hundreds of songs on iTunes, but they’re doing it.
Also, she talks about how she can’t get purchased music on her iPod in another fashion, when there are countless ways of doing so (without a loss in sound quality like she so erroneously reported) such as burning songs to a CD and then ripping them back or just buying a real CD and sticking them on her iPod.
So essentially Hilary is calling for Apple to open up the iTunes Music Store so other shitty MP3 player makers can crap up the entire market with confounding UIs and inferior hardware. What is great about the iPod + iTunes Music Store combination is that one company — who cares deeply about the user’s experience — is taking care of all of it, correctly. If you have disorganized hardware makers trying to interface with a multitude of music services, than the user suffers because now they have no idea what the best option is. Right now, the best option is the iPod.
Hi
At a recent blogging conference in Munich, one of the Gawker crew revealed that it was their software that couldn’t handle comments in the kinds of volumes they got. Nothing to do with strategy or even the tactical problems of managing comment spamm, trolls etc.
Whether or not they enable comments when it’s fixed, remains to be seen.
Russell
http://www.mobile-weblog.com
The Huffington Post now has comments. You should post and update. Bloggers wanted comments and they responded by adding them. Pretty cool and something Denton would never do.