Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

On blog comments

Mark Cuban asks an interesting question:

So the question is, is it worth it to allow unmoderated comments ? Or is babysitting comments just part of the job of bloggers ? Or are comments just a waste of time under all circumstances ?

Here is how I see it.

Your blog is like your house.  In your house, you have some rules.  You don’t have them written anywhere, but everybody follows them.  Like, do you take off the shoes when you come in or if you are allowed to smoke inside.  How loud can you speak and can you bring kids or animals with you.  You know your rules.

People, who are coming in for the first time, they don’t.  There are some etiquette rules, generic for everyone, that will almost always keep you on the safe side.  Like, don’t swear until somebody does it first.  Or ask for the permission to smoke.  Stuff like that. When people come to your house for the first time, they keep it on the safe side.  They observe how you and others behave.  They ask if they need something.

This  is pretty much how comments on the blog are.  When people come to the blog, they would usually read others comments before posting their own.  They start with simple, straightforward ones.  They grow slowly.  If they do something that you don’t like, you let them know.  It’s OK.  Most good people won’t need more than one correction.  They can understand and feel the atmosphere of the blog and of the discussions.

Of course, the more popular the blog gets, the more morons will come.  Inconsiderate idiots who will feel an obligation to annoy and offend the heck out of everybody else, they will post insulting comments to a few entries in the archives.  They will come back for more…

Give them a warning.  Once.  If you are in a good mood – twice.  If it’s not your day, you can skip the warning altogether.  Then just ban the troll. Filter them out. They aren’t worth your time. They aren’t worth the time of your blog’s visitors.  The sooner you’ll get rid of them, the better.  Don’t be afraid to hurt their feelings – they don’t have any anyway.

I like the way WordPress handles comments.  It gets rid of SPAM automatically.  It sends me comments from unknown users for moderation.  If I allow a comment from someone, all further comments will be automatically approved, unless I ban the user.  If I will ever be overwhelmed with moderation of comments (not likely), I always have an option to go for “only registered users are allowed to comment”…

As to the Mark’s question of the value of comments – yes, I see plenty of value in comments.  Comments is not the main reason for me blogging, but it’s a pretty important one.

The state of mass media

I really enjoyed this interview of Mike James, done by Terry Heaton.  Simple, direct, and to the point.  Some things discussed are obvious to anyone with a common sense.  Others are not so.   Here are a couple of quotes to get you started.

Television news (if you believe it is a form of journalism) has the ability…the responsibility…to capture and preserve the moments, the events, that pass through our daily lives. Instead, it has fallen back on trivial weepies and frothy feel-goods, on medical “studies” and video news releases, or political spin and opinionated shoutfests, hypothesis, rumor, and supposition. TV news is no longer in charge of itself. It deserves to be shot at sunrise.

Bloggers are banging at the door of reality. But there are too many of them. They are unfocused. Too wild-eyed. Too unconsidered. And they fade away with time. The internet is generations away from fulfilling its promise. Bloggers have found limited success only because mass media has failed so miserably.

So, it is possible …

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive.  One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress).  This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive.  And I am not much sad about it.  It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience.  But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works.  And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business.  These are some good news for me – failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.

Blogs in Plain English

Common Craft created yet another amazing 3-minute video.  This time they explain what a blog is, in plain English.  This is really useful for those of us who bring new people to the blogosphere.  After being around for a few years, it’s sometimes hard to express things in simple words, avoiding most of the terminology, and staying on the subject.  With this video, there is much less talking needed.

If you liked this one, check their Explanations in Plain English category for more videos.

What social people do …

In yet another Twitter review (and a nice one at that), I caught this quote (emphasis is mine):

If you are a twitterer, you can follow my infrequent tweets under my screen name of tevslin. My last tweet is from 3:45AM this morning complaining that I was up for an early flight. Don’t know why you want to know this; don’t know why I wrote it; but that’s what social people do.

Excellent!