Edit: Howdy friends of Des!
I’d love to comment on this blog post by Des Walsh but I’ll be fucked if I have to register for a username and password just for the honour of posting on the blog. It’s a good blog, don’t get me wrong but I don’t see why I have to register to leave a comment. Imagine if I had to do that with every blog I commented on. Imagine if I had to do this for every person I wanted to chat to on IM. Des, can you change your commenting policy?
As regards to the content of the post, I’d point to John Collin’s post on lack of business blogging from those showcase companies at the Goodbody Summit. The message has yet to get through about the benefits of blogging. We need more examples of good Irish business blogs and why a business should divert resources to such a thing. Enterprise Ireland, Goodbody, Deloitte should be the ones too talking to companies going “You don’t have a blog? Why on earth not?”. Blogging isn’t for everyone, this is true but I do think the blogging population should be larger if you look at other countries with business cultures like our own.
ZDnet Blogs are another example of where you have to give your Grandmothers middle name in order to leave a comment. They then use your email for ‘Promotional Marketing Activites’. At least in this case , as an Old Media Company dipping it’s toe in the Blogospere, it could be that ZDNet is just learning the ropes.
I’d be curious to compare your blog traffic with Des Walsh’s because above 1000 visitors a day and you start to get bots that plague your comments section. Invoking a registration process helps. Get more than 10,000 visitors a day and you need to moderate comments or kill them totally like Russ Beattie has done. Adam Curry has a 10,000 daily throughput and his comment area is bagged full of spammy sentences. So I can see why Des Walsh invokes registration. That said, even after I registered and posted a comment, it did not appear so something is wonky with the system on several levels.
Thanks for the comments and the links. By the way, Australia is no better on the biz blogging, as I have written a couple of times, e.g. on http://www.businessblogconsulting.com
As a temporary next best thing Damian, your post as above is now in the trackback attachment to the post in question. Bernie has a point about spam and when I opened up the system a while ago I got bombarded with the texasholdemsexfantasyyadayadayada spam. BlogHarbor has now introduced a way to make it easier for people to leave comments without opening the door to the spammers, so it may well be that I haven’t got the settings right. I understand the frustration, but it’s a real issue and as Bernie points out some of the pro bloggers have closed down comments. I would hate to do that.
And Paul, while I acknowledge your right to be satirical, I do not harvest the names for some nefarious marketing purposes.
Bernie, I will see if I can find out what happened when you posted a comment.
I have now changed the settings on my Thinking Home Business blog – there is still a CAPTCHA box to fill in for anynomous comments and all comments are moderated, as is evidently your practice here. Thanks for stirring me to change, Damian 🙂
Sorry – Damien.
I think you have to let the blog owner define a threshold for comments and a commenting policy. It’s the only way you control the unwanted noise–make things to easy to say and you could fill pages of comments with spam about everything under the sun. When that happens, you turn away comments.
where do I register 😉
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