The Last Podcast

Marc Andreessen wrote an interesting summary of the lessons he learned since joining the big, scary world of blogs.

I just want to pick up on two ideas here. Marc says the comment system is broken and that’s why he turned off the comments on his blog (though Scoble is coming to his rescue):

Blogging is clearly the second coming of high-quality Internet conversations, but it is also clear that comments on blogs run the same risk of being damaged by spam and abuse, and that new approaches to maintaining a high quality of discourse are required.

That, indeed, is a major problem. Without Akismet, even a D-lister like me would have to sift through various hundred spam comments a day. Marc cites David Sifry’s idea that one day, when we all have blogs, we can do away with comments and instead just write our responses on our own blog.

I think there are a number of problems with this.

A) this conversation would be extremely hard to follow. Just look at this post. To get to commenting on Marc’s post, I first have to introduce the post to my readers who might not be reading his blog. Without doing this, the blog would read like a conversation on Twitter where one only gets to read one side of the story.

B) (and related to A) the back-and-forth that makes a conversation a conversation is extremely hard to mimic in disparate blog posts.

However, I can see why Marc doesn’t want to be responsible for abusive comments about other people on his blog. However, I wonder if he doesn’t lose more than he gains from this.

I fully agree with his point that original content drives readership:

Some bloggers who blog a lot and link to a ton of interesting things every day have high levels of readership without a lot of original content, but I’d argue they are in the minority — most of the bloggers I’ve talked to over the last year who have significant levels of traffic attribute their readership mostly to original content, and this is certainly true for my blog.

I am guilty as charged when it comes to writing posts that are mostly commentary, however, the most popular posts I write are those that are original or at least talk about something outside of the echo-chamber of the blogosphere.

Marc was also wondering about StumbleUpon. It is indeed a huge source of traffic. Right now, I have one post that gets a hit from StubleUpon a minute. Over time, a post that people stumble upon over several days can rival the momentary surge of traffic from a frontpage story on Digg.