There was talk recently (can’t remember where) of whether a blog is a blog if it doesn’t have comments. Eh? Of course it’s a blog. That’s like saying a convertible isn’t a car because it has no roof.

But anyway.

I read a post today that convinced me that (while obviously not compulsory for a blog to be a blog) comments are a good thing. Or, rather the people who leave those comments are a good thing.

The post in question was this one - Blog Herald doesn’t understand why full-text feeds work - by Bob Scoble. You might have heard of him.

In it, he put forward an exceptionally convincing case for publishing full RSS feeds. In a nutshell, it went something like this… the people who are responsible for driving the most traffic to your blog (and hence to the ads on your blog) are journalists, connectors, bloggers, and geeks. Powerful people in this industry. They’re early adopters who use RSS feeds and feed aggregators to consume their information. They consume so much of it that they apparently don’t have time to visit the actual blogs themselves. And if they did, well, they’re not the kind of users who click on ads anyway. Blah blah. So therefore, they demand full RSS feeds in their aggregators. If they can skim and read your full posts easily (and providing you hae something interesting to say) they’ll link to you. And they’ll send you that traffic you want. More than you’d get by publishing excerpts, at least.

Genuis, I thought. Publishing a full feed is the way to go. I was convinced. Hook, line, sinker, rod, and the fucking little fishie, too. I almost switched the entire wurk network to full feeds there and then.

And then I read the comments.

The arguments put forward by some of those guys made a lot more sense to me than Bob did in his original post. They talked about the increased bandwidth costs that come with publishing full feeds. They talked about how publishing full feeds is more or less an invitation to steal your content. And they talked about how advertising in RSS feeds really does suck shit.

And that made me think some more. See, a lot of the people who fight for full feeds aren’t trying to monetise their content. They’re not running their blog as a business. And they probably don’t particularly care too much if a spammer rips them off. That’s not the real world where 99% of us live.

In fact, to a lot of us, content *is* our business - not a toy. It’s taken a lot of honest, hard work to generate, and if squeezing every last drop of revenue out of that content means publishing headlines only, or excerpts in our RSS feeds, then that’s what we’re going to do.

However, that’s not the point of this post. I’m not here to talk about RSS feeds. I’m here to say that while Bob’s post was a damn good one, it was made all the more interesting by the conversation that happened afterwards. In any blog, it’s in the comments where arguments are won and lost, where minds are changed, and where the strongest ideas always come out on top - no matter how high profile the blog - or the blogger - is.

At the end of the day, it’s the *people* that make blogging what it is.