Comment Overload

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Comment Overload
I read every comment I get. I don't always reply because I prefer to allow readers to have the last word - though at the urging of some readers I've tried recently to be more forthcoming in my replies. I have a fairly aggressive spam filtering system which means you have to use nice language and make some sense in your comments, which I know discourages some people - for that I apologize, but the payoff is that I can allow people to comment anonymously, without logging in. I appreciate comments because I appreciate being read but I will never write the sort of blog that is likely to accumulate 75 comments to a post - and if I did, I would understand at that point that I was not being true to my own philosophy, which is that ideas and expertise are and ought to be distributed, not clustered around a single person or a single website. More...