Every now and then, when a blog post of mine gets wider exposure on the Internet, I tend to get this question: Why doesn't my personal blog allow comments to be posted to entries?
The short is answer is: because I live in Hamburg, Germany.
And like some other German bloggers who deliberately don't have a facility for comments on their blogs, I don't want to have to spend any of my time pre-censoring blog comments (and dealing with the additional
The long answer is that I think that blog comments are a relic of the web's past, given that better alternatives for comments exist, and the interesting conversations have moved on there. One of them is Twitter. There is something to be said for compressing a comment into 140 chars: it seems to make it a bit harder for comments to turn into what John Gruber calls "cacophonous shouting matches". A great example of what Gruber refers to are YouTube comments - and that's why rather then spending my time screening and pre-censoring comments (see short answer above), I prefer to spend it having more interesting conversations.