Are blogs still about listening? No, Says Seattle Times

Under the provocative headline, "Blogs: Just more white noise?", Charles Bermant notes:

"I would like to see blogs with this kind of focus and follow another wise writing technique -- to write more about less. Instead, we are running toward a world where talking is more valuable than listening."

However, the issue is complex. Some bloggers are simply overwhelmed with the number of comments they receive and others worry that there may be legal implications to blog comments. Posted by B.L. Ochman

For me the decision about turning off comments had to do with the volume of comments, not the idea of comments. Listening is great, and I agree with that intent, but can you honestly listen to hundreds and hundreds of voices every single day? For me it became too much. I still wanted to listen, but I had to turn down the volume.

If people want to contact me, they can easily reach me through my contact form. But even there the volume is still pretty high -- dozens per day. I normally can't respond to everyone personally.

Comments were a great feature when my blog was small, but as traffic grew (it's now getting over 2 million page views per month), I couldn't keep up. I'm glad I turned comments off -- in fact, I actually wish I'd done it a few months sooner than I did. It would have saved me a lot of time and improved my focus.

Also, I've noticed that if I get hundreds of pieces of feedback on a given topic, they may contain no more useful information that what I get from 10 private emails. So it's not a good use of time to listen to the same types of feedback over and over.

BL, you didn't expect someone to make a comment after reading this post of yours, did you?