Please comment on this post… but hurry!
Jane Knight provides a useful weekly round-up of her web output (blog posts and bookmarks). Her latest is here. I’m frequently surprised at the response rates on some blogs, and on occasions, I’ve been reluctant to submit a comment just because I happen to have taken several days getting round to reading a post. Is a reply devalued because it may be a few days ‘too late’? Do bloggers give up responding to comments after a given period? I have about 100 blogs I regularly read through RSS (with my recent switch to using a Mac, I now use Vienna). I try to view these every day, but hey, we all have other things to do in our lives.
Whilst I recognize the affordances of currency and informality which blogging provides over other forms of academic discourse, has the emphasis on immediacy gone too far?Jane Knight’s round-up merely emphasizes that many blogging architectures provide weekly, monthly and yearly summaries, whilst tagging systems enable effective archive retrieval through subject matter. I sometimes come across blog posts several years old that are still of profound interest and relevance. As blog posts are increasingly cited in formal academic literature, how do we best negotiate the vast cultural and temporal inconsistencies which exist between them?
I’m frequently surprised at the quick response rates on some blogs, and on occasions, I’ve been reluctant to submit a comment just because I happen to have taken several days getting round to reading a post. Is a comment devalued because it may be a few days or weeks ‘too late’? Do bloggers give up responding to comments after a given period? I regularly read about 100 blogs through RSS (with my recent switch to using a Mac, I now use Vienna). I try to do this every day, but hey, we all have other things to do in our lives.
Whilst I recognize the affordances of currency and informality which blogging provides over other forms of academic discourse, has the emphasis on immediacy gone too far? Jane Knight’s useful weekly round-up of blog posts and bookmarks (her latest is here) reminds me that, by default, many blogging architectures enable weekly, monthly and yearly summaries, whilst tagging systems provide effective archive retrieval through subject matter. I sometimes come across blog posts several years old that are still of profound interest and relevance. As blog posts are increasingly cited in formal academic literature, how do we best negotiate the vast cultural and temporal inconsistencies which exist between them?
Tags: blog, blogging
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September 3rd, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I’m not sure how wordpress is set up, but in blogspot, I click on a list of posts and it will list the post and how many comments there are. I started out with having to approve each comment, but found 1) I didn’t always get to them the same day so they may be hanging out in cyber space for a while and 2) people didn’t comment as much. So I switched to allowing all comments. The problem…I didn’t see the comments that others had posted on previous posts. I can barely remember my kid’s date of birth (which I have gotten wrong 3 times this year already) much less how many comments each post had. So now I have my blog on a setting where comments more than a week old will need to be approved. Now I can read the comments on older posts as they show up on my dashboard.
I still have two problems with this. I don’t check my dashboard every day. And after I read the comment, I have to try to guess which post the comment about as there is no link on the dashboard to the comment. As a result, I usually do a search typing in a possible tag, check out the results (which I have to do immediately so I can tell if these are the comments I just read) and then reply to them.
September 4th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for your (quick!) reply Virginia.
It sounds like I’ll need to think about how best to manage my comments if and when I start getting the type of volume you appear to get. I just wonder if we have developed undefined cultural norms around the temporality of blogging discourse; in the way we write, access and comment on blogs.
September 4th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Andy, I don’t really get a lot of traffic! LOL. According to Google analytics and statcounter, I average about 10 readers a day and I average about 2-3 comments per post. For some reason, however, I do get people that comment many months after I have posted something. I wonder if they are the types of posts that someone might say, “Hey, I read about that and saved it on delicious…let me send you the link.”
It is important for bloggers to realize that your writings might be accessed long after you have posted them. Managing the comments is as important, I think, as creating tags, effective titles, and your profile.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Is social media going to kill SEO?