Every now and again, someone emails me to ask why CavLec doesn’t have comments. It’s a legitimate question. Some people would say that CavLec isn’t even a blog because it doesn’t have comments. (I actually have a post brewing on in-the-wild usage of the word “blog,” because it’s getting interesting.)
Commentlessness is certainly not the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 zeitgeist. It’s all about the communication, man! The n-way socialness of it all! Oh, the community!
Flippancy aside, the people who email me asking why CavLec doesn’t have comments would be great commenters, one and all. I concede that, and I also concede that not hearing from them and letting them bounce ideas off each other is a loss.
It is, however, a necessary loss if I am to keep blogging. That’s not a threat, just a fact.
There are trolls out there. There are creeps. There are people who hate me. There are people who hate my husband. There are people who hate overt feminists. I don’t think there are people who hate librarians, but who knows? There are blogcrashers (and they typically move in mobs). There are people who love the ol’ ad hominem. There are shouters. There are sockpuppets. They’re not the people who write me asking why CavLec doesn’t have comments—but if I enabled comments, I’d still have to deal with them.
And I don’t want to.
It’s not that I don’t participate in net-enabled social interaction. I do. Constantly. I comment on other folks’ blogs, I send email to bloggers, I do the occasional web-forum, I’m all over IM. (If you know my name, you know my home AIM handle. My work AIM handle—which is fully boss-sanctioned, so don’t bother trying to get me in dutch about it—can be found elseweb. Forgive if I don’t answer IMs right away at work; I sometimes forget to set myself away when I go to meetings or get absorbed in a problem.)
It’s just that CavLec is my space (not MySpace, but my space). Nobody has any claim on it but me (and if you think commenters and blog-colleagues don’t come to believe they own the place, I have a cautionary tale for you). I rant here, often pigheadedly, once in a while ill-advisedly (and I’m fully aware that rants on blogs invite ranty comments). I’m comfortable here. I relax here (within the limits of a publicly-open space). I’m not spammed, trolled, shouted down, attacked, grunched, or called names here. I like it that way. I need it to continue that way.
Once in a blue moon, I’ll get an ugly email. Most ugly emailers, however, are deterred by the statement in my sidebar about republication. This is good, because that’s what that statement is for (and that’s all it’s for, if anyone was wondering; I get a fair amount of CavLec-related email, but I certainly don’t make a habit of reposting it). The delete button takes care of such ugly emails as I do get; I’ve only ever had to bozofilter somebody (a persistent ebook troll) once.
So call me a coward or a censor all you like (I won’t argue!), but CavLec has no comments. For the adventurous, however, I will point out that CavLec has a LiveJournal feed, and that feed allows comments. I didn’t set up the feed and don’t control it (though I don’t at all mind that it’s there). Anonymous comments are possible, which means that folks without LJ accounts can comment. The comments on a post die when that post ages out of the feed display.
I do keep an eye on the LJ feed, and I do answer comments posted there when I see them. So if you’re just burning to say something, feel free.
