Oh no, another blog post about blogging …
John Naughton discusses whether blogs need to have comments, picking up James Cridland’s piece on the topic. John Naughton doesn’t have comments on his blog - and neither do many other big-no…

We don’t all have the time, writing skill, Myers-Briggs personality type or the guts to expose our latest mind processes in a prominent stream of digital text.

I was at a school in Sussex last week where we ran some brainstorms (or “thought showers” as they call them) with a couple of classes. One student was a bit shy and didn’t say anything for ages. Then when he did, it was midly rubbish and instantly forgettable. But this was a brainstorm so nobody judged it and so it sparked other, more brilliant ideas including a genius top story with which to lead their radio station news bulletin.

It’s the same with blogs. Many comments are weak, off the cuff, instant and poorly thought-out reactions but if they prompt a blogger onto something better then that has value in itself.

Oh, and that top story?… Canteen runs out of pancakes. Were they too cheap? Are some pupils too greedy? Were the canteen staff incompetent or lazy? That’s next… but not on any blog.

You, I note, now have a notify by email thing, but precious few others do, and its not exactly a solution I can see scaling to something like the BBC Editors blog (Radio Labs, however… Why not see if you can manage to get a checkbox on there, and maybe write a post afterwards about how bureaucratic it was?)

For what its worth, I enjoy reading many BBC blogs, but I rarely if ever bother to comment on them these days. I did in the early stages, but stopped when I realised (a) the delay in posts going up, which I put down to moderation, which I later found was (b) outsourced (ugh) and (c) later saw a message from someone at the BBC saying they were having problems with the mirroring.

The final straw, as it were, was when one of my posts was edited. (I was querying why the Wimbledon live scores on the BBC website had to be presented in a fixed-font, ripped from Ceefax, when they were neatly formatted on BBCi*, should you care..)

In an attempt to soften my criticism, I’d made a rather unnecessary reference to poor BBC staff being stuck in portakabins for a fortnight. However that bit never made it to air, because ‘Portakabin’ got changed to ‘mobile building’ - which I thought was rather silly because it (a) spoiled the flow of my sentence and (b) - I considered it a waste of the license fee having someone (an outsourced someone) sitting around editing out trademarks from blog comments (especially when the following year another BBC sport *post* - read by an order of magnitude more people if you believe the 1/10/100 rule - contained ‘portakabin’ in the text..)

So these days, if I want to say something to someone in the BBC, I’ll use email, Facebook or their personal blog, should they have one. And, I should say, perhaps because of my incessant charm and wit, or perhaps because BBC people are generally rather pleasant, and more used to receiving emails full of hate and vitriol, I think that without exception everyone I’ve written to over the years has written back.

Oh, and to take the title of your post literally, I don’t write a blog of my own, because this comment alone has taken far too long to type, and I know that by the time I’ve found something to write about, someone else will have written it up a far more eloquent and researched post than I could ever hope to.

(* They weren’t on the BBCi app the following year, so maybe they were typed manually after all..)