I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

WHY I DON'T ENABLE THE "COMMENTS" FUNCTION...

Besides the fact that, if anyone has anything important they want to tell me about one of my posts, they can take two seconds to type one of the three e-mail addresses I give at the side into their e-mail or webmail applications.

From Bloggers Suffer Burnout by Daniel Terdiman, Wired.

"In the days following the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year, a new blog called Whiskey Bar quickly became a popular online destination for opponents of the war. The site's author, who ran the site as a virtual bar with himself as the bartender, encouraged visitors to share their views on the topic at hand.

Over the last six months or so, however, a surge in traffic has transformed Whiskey Bar into something more like a jam-packed nightclub than the cozy neighborhood watering hole the site's owner, known as Billmon, had originally envisioned. His postings often generated hundreds of comments, each of which he moderated.


But running the website soon became a dominant activity in his day, and on June 28, Billmon announced: "Last call." Whiskey Bar would no longer accept comments.

"You've only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I've got a full-time day job, and something had to give," Billmon said. "In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn't able to keep up with it."

Still, cutting readers out of the conversation was a disappointing solution for Billmon, a former journalist who relished the kind of feedback newspaper reporters rarely get.

"When I started out, I really wanted (Whiskey Bar) to be very interactive," Billmon said. "That's one of the most exciting things about blogging, that ability to have dialogue with your readers.""

Not that I agree with the guy's politics, and had never heard of his blog prior to this article, but his example does make a valid point... opening yourself up to comments can be too much work, if you care at all about moderating. I suppose this blog doesn't get the amount of traffic where moderation of comments would be that much of a chore, but, still, I'm lazy and that's more work than I care to do.

And interactivity is overrated; I put up this blog so that the "world" can know what I think, and, to be blunt, I'm not all that concerned with what other people think about what I think and I'm not that much of a debater, so, if anyone doesn't like what I say and feels that strongly, they can write an e-mail, like I said before, or they can denounce me in their own blog (free publicity for me, heh heh).

As for getting burned out in general, I was for much of last spring and summer, maily for personal reasons too complicated and private to get into, and, also, because I think, prior to the burnout, that I was trying too hard to make this another "warblog" when I rarely had anything particularly original to add, not that my support for American intervention in the Middle East has diminished any nor do I think the war in Iraq was a mistake, just that I don't feel like writing about it much anymore if I can't say something new. As for politics in general, the past couple of weeks I have been feeling melancholy about the election results, both in this riding and nationally, and also it's summer and there's a lot going on here in Montreal that isn't politcial and all th big summer movies and my attention span for anything political this time of year is extremely short.

In other news, we may be moving to Ottawa soon, since it will be easier for my parents and I to find jobs there. I'll miss Montreal a lot, and also Pincourt, even if it isn't the most exciting bedroom community in the world, but we need some new source of income urgently and our French just isn't up to snuff and, since three of the four Brandon children (meaning everyone except myself) are living independently of our parents, we can sell this house and move somewhere half the size without too much pain. Hopefully, I will finally have my driver's license and I'll make monthly trips to Montreal to get French manga from Renaud-Bray, though I'm aware that they do have a reasonable selection at the Ottawa Chapters near the Rideau Centre. And the nice thing you can say about Ottawa is "At least it's not Toronto". Nothing's written in stone yet, though.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 10:15 PM