The discussions that are written about often raise important issues in my mind and at times I feel strongly enough about an issue to respond to what was written, usually via commenting on a particular blog post. Such is the case with a recent blog post by Roy Tennant, called “Shoot the Dogma.” In this post Roy talks about a presentation in which one of the panelists uttered the statement, “Shoot the dogma,” as part of a larger narrative about why we should question many of our longstanding beliefs and practices. In this case she was referring to cataloging in particular. Roy picked that as the title of his post and said that this was one statement in the discussion that really stood out to him.

After thinking about that statement for a little bit, I decided to respond. See the link above to the post and the following comments for a complete picture of what was said and by whom. I guess what bothered me (and still does) about that statement is that it represents, to me, the latest in what I would call “the soundbite phenomenon.” Someone else who is regularly quoted with provocative or interesting soundbites is Stephen Abram. No personal affront intended, but I get tired of soundbites like this. Why? Well, there are many reasons. One is that many things are easier said than done. Another reason is that in my observation over many years in the profession, there is a tendency for us to grab ahold of a soundbite like this and shake our heads in affirmation, without really exploring its meaning and implications to see if the point made is actually credible or defensible.

In this case, as Karen Schneider pointed out in responding to my comment in Roy’s post, I need to understand and be aware of the larger context of the discussion. I plan to listen to the audio archive linked from that post so that I can be better informed. This is a reminder, as many others have found in the past, that responding to what someone has chosen to filter or write about in a conference session on a blog somewhere, especially if that response is critical, can be tricky.

One final observation. I find it weird that my criticism of something someone said should be met with the response that, basically, questions my criticism because “This is a domain in which [that other person] has a lot of knowledge.” Oh, please. Let’s just set aside the implication that I lack experience in these areas for now. My criticism, or anyone else’s for that matter, should stand or fall on its own merits. Maybe my criticism, such as it is, will turn out to be invalid. If so I will be the first to admit it.

Anyhow, to make it easy on anyone who wants to participate, I’ve included the poll below as part of this post. Take a moment to tell me what you think:

[poll=2]

What motivates you to comment on a post (or not)?

Please take a minute to fill out this poll so that I can get an idea of what you think about commenting on blog posts. The poll is in the righthand sidebar. It should only take you a few seconds to complete. Results of the poll will be available for you to see. Thank you in advance!

Battle of the comment add-ons

[OK, it's been a long day but that was incredibly dumb, even for me. If comments aren't working then OBVIOUSLY you won't be able to leave a comment. Sooooo...If you can't make a comment to this post for whatever reason, would you mind sending me a quick email instead? Thanks.]

It is really important, in my mind, to pay attention to, and encourage, comments in the blogosphere.  As I have noted before, the fact that someone comments at all is a big deal because it isn’t necessarily easy or straightforward to do it.  In many cases, for someone to take the time and effort to comment on something on a blog is an indication of a strong interest or opinion.

However, as a blog author, I am often uncertain as to whether to respond to a comment.  For instance, although I want to show regard and thankfulness for every comment, should I always add a comment to someone else’s?  Is it ok or necessary to do this if/when the only thing I might have to say is “Thanks”?

There are many times where a blog author hardly ever acknowledges or responds to comments, even if the comment is posing a direct question to the blog author, or the comment adds a lot to the discussion or provides a thoughtful viewpoint.  If I’m the commenter and I’ve put in a lot of thought and/or effort into a comment on someone else’s blog in an attempt to add something significant to the idea, concept, or subject of the post in question, and I receive no response whatsoever, I am pretty discouraged.  When that happens, especially when it happens over and over again, I’m not going to bother commenting any more.  In some cases that is probably a good thing or doesn’t matter much.  In other cases, I think it’s a shame.  Sometimes it is downright disrespectful.

I realize that there are all kinds of reasons why comments may or may not be answered by the blog author or by someone else.  We all have a hard time keeping up with email let alone acknowledging or responding to comments on blogs (our own or someone else’s).  We may not have any opinion or reaction and therefore choose not to respond for that reason.  We may simply overlook the fact that someone has made a comment.  We may in fact want to discourage comments by a certain person with an axe to grind or who is being disruptive in some way.  (Personally, I’ve never faced this situation, but then, this blog has a pretty small readership, which is fine with me.)

So I am often left to wonder and puzzle over this issue.  Comment?  Or no comment?  And what does that mean?  Or does it mean anything at all?  I wish I had more solid answers.

What if, in the news aggregator of your choice, when you are reading a blog posting and have some reaction to it or desire to comment on it, you could readily jot down a comment within the aggregator itself, that is, without having to leave your existing interface context?

In addition, I sure would like to be able to read the comments that have already been added to a post within the aggregator itself. I know of course that there are ways to make the feed a combined post/comments feed and that this is one way to achieve the goal. But it isn’t be as elegant or simplistic as what I would like to see.

• coComment: This service just keeps getting better. Now it allows me to track conversations via webpages or comments on individual postings. Cool! Even better is the fact that I can be notified when someone has commented on a webpage or posting or comment by seeing the coComment icon in my webbrowser change color. When there has been some activity on something that I have tracked in coComment, the blue coComment icon in my web browser’s status bar adds a red-bordered envelope. Another cool feature is that if I navigate to a webpage that anyone else is tracking via coComment, the coComment icon turns orange to let me know that others are discussing it. All in all, very nice!

• Meebo: I have been using Meebo for a little over a month now and have found it to work quite well for the IM accounts I use, including Google Talk, AOL, and Yahoo! Messenger. A few days ago they really hit the ball out of the ballpark, in my opinion, when they announced a new service called Meebome. Basically this allows me to embed a live chat service in any webpage I want. I quickly put one here in my blog and I might add it to a few other places. With this service in place, I can be logged into Meebo and automatically see if/when someone visits FML! Noone has initiated a chat with me yet but it is really interesting to see in real time the number of people who visit the site.

• Bloglines: Like coComment, this service, too, just keeps improving. The latest improvement allows users to use the letter ‘o’ to open up the original blog post when viewing it in Bloglines. The lack of this feature (which has been present in Google Reader from day one) has been the only major gripe I’ve had with the service ’til now.

• Google Maps: I have always liked this service and again, it just keeps getting better! The latest improvements include the ability for me to use the service from my cell phone. Very, very nice. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. The only problem is that as one would expect, it takes up a lot of bytes and I will have to watch this carefully because of service limitations in terms of the size of data transfers with my cell phone service. Another improvement in the service is that I can now store favorite locations.

• Comcast Digital Voice: This VOIP service from our cable TV and Internet provider is something we’ve thought about in the past but didn’t try because we didn’t think we needed a dedicated home telephone. We thought we could just rely on our cell phone service instead. After trying this for a few weeks, though, we concluded that it would be good to have a regular telephone service. We chose Comcast Digital Voice because it seemed to meet our needs quite well and we get a discount because we are already have other Comcast services. We’ve only had it in place for a few days but it seems to work great!

Blogged with Flock

This service addresses a couple of my complaints about the marginalization of comments in general. I’ve already mentioned that it enables you to keep track of your own comments. It also allows you to insert tags into all of your comments. Pretty cool! And coComment’s development team is working on addressing a third complaint of mine, by developing a way to crawl comments in the blogosphere so that they can be readily indexed and searchable.

I’ll play around with it some more and see about making changes but for now, I think this is a worthwhile service and I recommend it to others to try.