Jeff, since you blog’s popularity is very high and there are a lot comments, isn’t it time to somehow let the readers rate each comment in a way that the best ones show up in the top of the comments section?
One of my reasons for asking this it because English is not my first language so I believe I take twice the time as you to go over all comments. So I read just a few comments and I believe (as you said) I’m missing a lot of information or interesting (why not hilarious) stuff.
So your writing is a commodity? Can I find it anywhere? Why do you claim a copyright to it then? … Sorry, just not following your analogy to Amazon where “The products themselves are commodities…”
What makes some bloggers successful? Their unique perspective? Their clear writing, entertainment value, or intelligence? Sometimes maybe it’s their controversial positions or the reputation they’ve built up. I’d rate any of those things above the comments at any blog. If your writing is a commodity you might as well post stories from a wire service or become a newsfeed. Try to become the next Slashdot or Digg, picking ‘commoditized’ news items and hope the community can submit comments that can carry the ‘blog’? (Just playing devil’s advocate) I agreed with Leo Laporte when he pulled the comments off TWIT. Don’t get me wrong, I read a lot of comments around the web - it’s just that the signal to noise sometimes gets to low - getting rid of comments helps me stop wasting time.
Finally, a definition of programming I can actually understand
Dude, I’m with you on this one (that arguably doesn’t happen too often). comments are master. Who cares who or what wrote or generated that comment tho. I laughed my ass of anyway.
Kris
Jonas’ idea of rating comments is a nice one, this is after all a community a bit above the typical “lets rate this lolcat up and everything with more than 2 lines down and comment with tldr” level.
Great so 99% of the time my blog isn’t a blog.
Jeff,
I agree the comments can be as informative and educational as the blog post itself. I have enjoyed reading your posts for a while now and I have never commented until now. Like with all innovative things the more “input” that you have to draw upon the better and more innovative the “output” will be. This is very much evident in the more informative blogs that are out there and the tangents that the comments can lead to are often as interesting or more so than the original post.
Keep up the great work and thank you for giving us a forum to learn and engage with.
I’m leaning on that “Hello” comment having been generated/splogged. Spam blogs have no shortage of cryptic-yet-amusing sentences strung together. Here’s another funny one, courtesy of a “Bill Gates”:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2561404420/sizes/o/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2561404420/sizes/o/</a>
Nice comment Markov, we all know who you are, no need to hide behind names.
Anyways Jeff why don’t you try to write a Markov Generator and feed it your blog, I’m sure you’ll have a blast with the results. You might even be able to automate your blog posting 
In some countries, comments are a legal liability. Since you are effectively the publisher for the comments on your blog, some legal systems hold you accountable for the things people write in these comments. Thus, if somebody says something that is illegal in this country (such as a defamation), you might have to pay the price for this. This happened to me, so there’s no comment system on my blogs.
Statistics applied to strings/characters given a measure of weight(based on the number of times a given letter appears) have been shown to become startlingly coherent and full fledged words when trying to recite Shakespeare’s Hamlet at random, as if a monkey could sit at a board and type away until he succeeded writing the full play[Intro to Statistics and its Applications, Chapter 2.4]. Thus, I’m also leaning on the generator for this poster.
The other thing I wanted to say was the comments on your site are often very useful… however, it’s the format that is sometimes unbearable in the amount of 50 comments of which I don’t have to tell you, since you’re developing stackoverflow to solve this issue.
It’s also comical how someone, with Joel Spolsky’s writing skill and its progression through the years, doesn’t allow comments… it’s almost conceited in a way to say what he said about them in the podcast where you two discussed it. It’s all about the exchange… but in his case it seems as if he’s just ranting or just writing when he could be engaging in the kind of exchange that occurs here.
Indeed, the best part of a blog post often begins where the blog post ends. If you are offended by that, I humbly submit you don’t understand why blogs work.
Perhaps. I blog for two reason: to focus my mind and to store knowledge. Blogging helps me to think through the stance that I’m about to take, and that helps me to better understand the thing that I’m talking about. If I learn something interesting or confusing, or have an insight, I like to blog about it in the hopes that it helps somebody else.
It’s important to distinguish between blogging as a action and blogging as an attitude. I think you’re speaking more about the second.
As a developer, a lot of techniques and ideas seem to come from blogs entries found during Google searches. This increased to insane levels during my brief work with Ruby on Rails. The comments were useful, but only when the original poster’s solution didn’t work as advertised.
On the other hand, I’ve just gotten my first comments from people that I don’t know, and it’s downright thrilling!
LOL, if that comment was auto-generated by some tool after all, I will LMAO. anyway, since when Jeff promoted from humble blogger to someone who promotes the best invention or best comment ever? I kind of liked this blog more when Jeff was just employed by his old company and developing software for common people. Since he started to work on stackoverflow and “developing for developers”, I feel like content of this blog goes “out of scope” since many topics sadly don’t relate to me anymore. Don’t take me wrong, this is still the best blog I know, it’s just that I was used to read here more practical posts.
Also I agree with comments. Many times when I’m trying to make my mind on something. I like to know what “Jeff thinks” but also need to see if and how community challenges that.
I think whoever left that strange comment about the definition of programming may have been on large amounts of psychedellics (probably LSD) at the time. A long time ago I used to be an intergallactic LSD shaman , and when I tried to write on LSD, it often wound up sounding a lot like that comment when I read it sober (which is disappointing since the message seems to be of infinite importance when you write it). The phrases “fourth power of twelve”, “fortran fortified kilomanjaro fence” and especially “super werewolf from the infinite realm of ninja-step” simply reek of LSD.
Hi,
Not seen a blog from you on .Net, Performance, Programming for quite a some time. Waiting fot the one badly. Now a days topics are more on genric side of the wall than specific.
I read your blog (as many do) through Google Reader. So most of the time, I see no comments. Also, a blog like yours gets so many comments, that I honestly can’t read them all. I skim and scan, depending on how interested I am on the topic.
Using some of the ideas from Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, I assume that 80% of your posts come from 20% of your visitors. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of your comments compared to your total subscribers and see if there are serial posters. Posting is really great for that 20%. For the rest of us, I don’t think it matters as much as you think. Since it’s your blog, you are in the 20% group. Maybe check your feedburner stats to see how many people read and how many open/click through. That would show how many people read the post/versus read the comments.
Your comment, “It’s not a blog without comments” is sort of self-serving. There are blogs out there with minimal comments and I read them regularly. Blogs are for journaling. Some have a social group around them and some don’t. Anyway, I don’t want to blather too long on my first post.
Last thing: Subscribe to comments is a great blog feature. If you think comments are so important, why can’t I subscribe to a thread?
“and between the commenters themselves”
Try “amongst”, not “between” here, unless you think that you have only two people who comment on your blog.
Pedantic A**hole strikes again!
@RevMike – Might want to read up on your prescriptivist bullshit before you run around being a pedantic *sshole:
http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Faculty/chesson/between_and_among.htm
Hypothesis:
I suspect one of the hardest parts of a regular blog is (and I’m guessing here because I don’t do this…) is to come up with topics that are interesting and draws in the readers to comment.
Observation:
You are blogging about blogging, not about the topic.
Conclusion:
You couldn’t come up with a good programming topic today…
Hmmmm … maybe you could use the “Dirty Jobs” method… ask people what topics they would like to discuss? Bank them for “those” days…
A blog without comments is a blog. Comments are a service, a handy source of catharsis for the readers, but the value they add to the blog itself - especially an opinion blog like this one - are dubious at best.
I mean, look - out of all of the thoughtful, interesting comments that get posted here, you ended up replying to what was most likely a spam-bot’s auto-gen comment. The “conversation” is entertaining, but in the same way that talking to Eliza is entertaining. There’s no real debate. If i want to actually discuss something you bring up, i’ll do it on a mailing list or forum somewhere else, a system built for discussion rather than drive-by “graffiti commentary”.
What’s with the navel gazing anyway?
imo, “hello”'s quote is dead on: since you code for your users, not logic, coding is often times gluing together a mass of seemingly non-related and esoteric ideas and bits of…matter? stuff? orange sponge donkeys? …into one – as comprehensible as you can get it to be – “story”.
That is what “hello” illustrated for us all.