I’ve always hated walled gardens. Before I started blogging in
2004, I had a point of view that was driven from my desire to share
interesting information with my friends and colleagues. Since I’m a
big reader, I run across a lot of stuff and have always enjoyed
sharing, going back to the late 1980’s when I used to cut articles out
of magazines and mail them to people.
When I started blogging, I gained an entirely new perspective. As a
writer, I was proud when people referenced things I wrote. I loved the
debate and discussion around topics that were controversial. I’ve
always been comfortable expressing my opinion and having people express
a different opinion, as I almost always learn something as long as
there is a real discussion.
Over the weekend, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Why Comments Matter. Fred and I had a discussion about comments several years ago shortly after Intense Debate and Disqus
appeared on the scene. Fred went on to invest in Disqus (WordPress
acquired Intense Debate) and Fred has demonstrated that he’s a master
at building a community that really engages with his blog (167 comments
so far on Why Comments Matter – a little recursive, but proves the point.) Fred ends his post (well worth reading) with:
“So my advice to the world of journalism is to
ignore Douglas Bailey’s advice and keep the comment threads at the end
of news stories. But doing that is not enough. You need to use the best
comment systems out there and they are usually from third parties like
Disqus, not from your CMS vendor. And you need to have your journalists
participate actively in the discussions. If you do all of that, you can
host great discussions at the end of your news stories and who wouldn’t
want that?”
I was pondering the last sentence as I read Sam Harris’ Op-Ed titled Science Is in the Details
in the New York Times this morning. It’s a sharply written op-ed about
Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as the next director of the
National Institutes of Health. Harris – a well known atheist who
recently wrote Letter to a Christian Nation
– dissects a recent presentation by Collins which scared the shit out
of me. As I worked my way through the article, I was looking forward
to the comments (which I expected would be strongly polarized) and
noticed that – voila – there were no comments.
I then decided to tweet the article.
As this is the NYT, I remembered that if I just used the base URL, then
anyone who came across it would be forced to register for the NYT to
read the article that I had just shared (dumb). But – there’s a
solution – using the NYT “E-mail” option I emailed the article to
myself and then tweeted that URL (after running it through awe.sm to
shorten it). I thought about this some more and realized that I could
have chosen the “Share” option on the NYT site (instead of the “E-mail”
option) which gives me a “permalink” for the article.
“To link to this article from your blog, copy and
paste the url below into your blog or homepage. Using this link will
ensure access to the article, even after it becomes part of the NYT
archive.”
For a few minutes, I thought I was really clever to figure out the
“email to myself” thing. Then I realized I wasn’t actually clever at
all; instead, the NYT was being obtuse by making this hard to figure
out. Most people don’t know what a permalink is – they are just going
to forward the article around using the “Send Link” feature in their
browser.
Sam Harris should just get a blog and follow Fred’s lead. Oh wait – he has one. Sam – turn your comments on! Like so many things, the debate is the most interesting and important part.
(Image source: lumq.com)
