Do blogs need comments?

WordCamp Canada is doing a great job of creating a little community around my keynote there in October.

I have some experience running blogging conferences, I did the first ones in the US starting in 2003 called BloggerCon.

In a lot of ways I want to see if we can reboot the blogosphere in the age of social media and get the web and twitter-like services to merge. Until then imho the idea of the "social web" remains a dream.

I also feel very strongly that WordPress is a key part of that ecosystem, we just have to build the connections, and we've already started. This should be important to the WordPress community. I feel like I'm part of it, btw -- in a way I am both extremely late and extremely early. By getting involved in WordPress now, in the mid-2020s, I'm being transported back to when I left this thread, in the mid 00s. And I find that some of the things I was working on then are not here yet. That's why I made WordLand and the other part which I haven't announced yet, but is getting pretty close. I totally expect to have that done by the time we're in Ottawa in October.

Anyway the question they asked on Twitter yesterday was keying off a great story Joel Spolsky wrote about something I wrote in 2007, where I suggested that not only don't blogs require comments, sometimes comments can take something that is a blog and make it not a blog. You can get a feel of what the blogosphere was like then. Joel is brilliant and snarky and respectful. His comments added to what I wrote. But it was done at a distance. That's the great thing about a blog, you get to finish a thought. It's true of podcasting too. Anyway when asked why blogs need comments, I say that's a trick question because they don't.

I want to try rebooting the blogosphere now, but take new paths we didn't in the 90s and 00s.

Lots to say about that, and I do in this 30 minute podcast. I haven't listened to it yet myself. This is basically my "Hello World" podcast to the WordPress world. I expect there will be many more. I hope there are.