52 Bicycles

Michael Arrington seems to think so in his latest, What Is The Definition Of A Blog?

I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume. We’ve allowed comments here on TechCrunch since it started. At times, user comments can be painful to deal with. But they also keep the writer honest, and make the content vastly more interesting.

I disagree. The valuable part ofd the conversation that blogs represent is not in the comments, but in the trackbacks, linking from journal to journal to create a multifaceted conversation. Comments are even distracting from this larger conversation, concentrating a thread of discussion on one page of one site, rather than spreading it out across the web.

If links are currency, as Jeff Jarvis says, then focusing on comments (which are linkless) instead of conversations between blogs is impoverishing.

I offer comments (to little effect, though I get hundreds of comments every week from kind purveyors of physical enhancement products) but I really value the trackbacks offered by others. Some of which show up on this blog (don’t know why it doesn’t always take) and others I discover by accident.

Anyhow, happy new year everyone - looking forward to continuing the conversation in 2007!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This