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> "If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there." This is actually the common mode of conversation in one area of the academic blogosphere I follow, and it's annoying as hell. I would definitely not want it to become a common model. Instead of centralizing a discussion in comments somewhere, I have to follow a web of "Just writing a quick note in reply to Michael here" and trackbacks and whatnot amongst 5-8 blogs that usually participate in the conversation. If you're not following it in real-time, it's especially annoying to try to reconstruct the conversation, versus if it were in one blog's comments, or a web forum somewhere, or on a mailing list, or anything else other than 5-8 people with separate blogs replying to each other on their own blogs. In this case, though, it's less due to blog authors not wanting comments (most have them on), and more due to the repliers always thinking their reply is so important that it has to be kicked up to a reply-post, rather than living as a mere blog comment. I do like the "blogs are publishing" analogy he uses, but for negative reasons: instead of people conversing directly, this model of "reply on your own blog" results in the equivalent of everyone printing up broadsides or pamphlets with their ideas. So you print your pamphlet, and if someone disagrees, they print their own, and instead of 5 people discussing things, you have 5 pamphleteers scattering their dueling pamphlets around town. Nonetheless, the old model of publishing documents on the web seems fine, but I don't see why it should be in blog format then. If you have a document that's worth "publishing", imo it should usually be of somewhat lasting interest, and you should pick a format other than reverse-chronological-order to organize your published documents (though it's fine to have a "recent documents" list to direct frequent readers to what's new). |
Everywhere else it only works at the extreme ends — for total takedowns like the recent Kurzweil/Myers dustup and friendly 'Sue's post on x inspired me to post this on y', but not anything in between. Trackbacks were the worst thing to come out of SixApart, and those guys were chock full of bad ideas. Basically tailor-made for spam.