One Last Comment About Blog Comments (Hint: They're Back)

I’ve missed you. How have you been?

Sadly, I shut the commenting functionality on this blog down on April 16th of this year. I shut them down, because the spam was (without question) out of control. In a strange twist of fate/timing the blog comments being shut off happened in and around the same time that the subject of commenting on blogs re-entered into the social media zeitgeist. Some notable sites had decided to shut their comments down, and allow the discourse to flow wherever it may (on Twitter, Facebook, someone else’s blog, etc…). With that, many passionate bloggers who have built substantive audiences bemoaned this move. In a meta-move, I blogged about the entire situation over here: Shutting Down Blog Comments.

What did I say?

If you go back and read that blog post, you will note that I was going to re-initiate blog comments on a better system. Well, I’m thrilled to let you know, that you can comment away on the Six Pixels of Separation blog, once again. First, I’d like to thank my team at Twist Image for pulling this together. Between the news of us being acquired by WPP and our full-plate of client work, they managed to find the time to get this done. With that, we have decided on Disqus to moderate the blog comments. I’m hopeful that this will help keep the spammers away (I’ll keep you posted). I’m also hopeful that this new system will enable me to interact a whole lot more with you. Over the years, I sincerely struggled with the old commenting system. I was in a place where I was reading each and every comment, but didn’t feel compelled to always reply, interact, agree, thank, disagree, acknowledge and more. I loved all of the feedback, additional discourse and more, but I was much more focused on reading, thinking and writing the next post, article, book, presentation, etc…. I know that some see this as not being very "social," but I would (and still do) disagree. Everything that I write is not about me interacting with you. Everything that I write is then open for you to comment on, for you to create more content on, for you to interact with others on. That was my true hope. To me, what makes any piece of content "social" is how shareable and findable it is. That’s it. It’s not about how much back and forth the content creator has with any one individual. There is nothing all that social about two people having a back and forth on a blog as everyone else looks on. There is something beautifully social about a piece of content that others add to and discuss amongst themselves and others.

With that…

There was something "missing" from this blog since the comments went down last April. Yes, the links were shared on Facebook, Twitter and beyond. Yes, the readership was still there, but once that final period on the last sentence of my last paragraph was written, that place… the one where you take it… was gone. I missed that. So, hopefully, you will come back, you will add, you will share and you will – hopefully – forgive me if I’m not always defending my position 😉

Let’s see how this goes…