Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Blurring Blogs and Forums
The line between blogs and discussion forums continues to blur. Leone For Third burns up and reemerges from the ashes as Lookout Landing, with cooler commenting abilities (side topics spawn their own thread sort of), and the ability to create your own "diaries", which are essentially independent threads that allow even more commenting.
For anyone who has tried to read through 50-150 comments at the PI Blog or USS Mariner, this commenting is certainly a nice change.
At the PI Blog, Mike is essentially putting out news placeholders for you to comment on. However, I find that I go to most blogs to read the thoughts of the blogger, not the readers. The comments always seemed to be a good place to interact with the blogger, but at the larger sites turns into discussions with other readers.
I guess that's why I do my blogging here, and when I want a baseball discussion, I go over to SportSpot. Of course, SportSpot is blurring the line in the other direction by offering forum members the ability to create their own blog on that site.
It all makes for one big wacky world for M's fans to navigate through. I guess variety is the spice of life, so you can pick your favorite format, and your favorite group of fans to hang out in discussions with. Still, I wish that blog comments were only responded to by the authors. I know that I can't be alone in saying that when I read comments at Leone For Third, I was mainly looking for responses from Jeff & Trent, and when I read comments at USS Mariner, I was looking for feedback from (or providing feedback to) Dave, Jason and Derek.
I guess the good news is that my little happy corner of the blogosphere mainly generates comments of the "You're an Idiot!" variety, so I've not had to worry about the problem of comments turning into discussion forums. I will continue to look at your comments and respond where appropriate. I appreciate the feedback on my (sometimes overly) optimistic entries here. I look at the calendar and can't believe that I've been doing this for over a year now (okay, minus a brief hiatus while the M's searched for a 5-game winning streak). Thanks for reading, and good luck in your search to find entertaining and informative reading in the M's blogosphere.
For anyone who has tried to read through 50-150 comments at the PI Blog or USS Mariner, this commenting is certainly a nice change.
At the PI Blog, Mike is essentially putting out news placeholders for you to comment on. However, I find that I go to most blogs to read the thoughts of the blogger, not the readers. The comments always seemed to be a good place to interact with the blogger, but at the larger sites turns into discussions with other readers.
I guess that's why I do my blogging here, and when I want a baseball discussion, I go over to SportSpot. Of course, SportSpot is blurring the line in the other direction by offering forum members the ability to create their own blog on that site.
It all makes for one big wacky world for M's fans to navigate through. I guess variety is the spice of life, so you can pick your favorite format, and your favorite group of fans to hang out in discussions with. Still, I wish that blog comments were only responded to by the authors. I know that I can't be alone in saying that when I read comments at Leone For Third, I was mainly looking for responses from Jeff & Trent, and when I read comments at USS Mariner, I was looking for feedback from (or providing feedback to) Dave, Jason and Derek.
I guess the good news is that my little happy corner of the blogosphere mainly generates comments of the "You're an Idiot!" variety, so I've not had to worry about the problem of comments turning into discussion forums. I will continue to look at your comments and respond where appropriate. I appreciate the feedback on my (sometimes overly) optimistic entries here. I look at the calendar and can't believe that I've been doing this for over a year now (okay, minus a brief hiatus while the M's searched for a 5-game winning streak). Thanks for reading, and good luck in your search to find entertaining and informative reading in the M's blogosphere.
