1) The blog started as a searchable spot to put bookmarks, no dreams of glory.
2) Who has time to moderate the comments?
If we do end open it up we'll probably have some guidelines.
Here are some tips from Tom Davenport's Harvard Business Review blog:
HT: PE HubIn my last post, I asked commenters to volunteer their theories about why some business ideas take off and others don't, and promised to reward the winner with a copy of my new book Analytics at Work. There were lots of comments, and I have read them carefully. (The process was painfully similar to grading student papers!) I'll reveal the winner below, but reading all the comments made me reflect on what makes for a good online comment. The ingredients are:
- A dash of brevity. Nobody wants to read through pages of verbiage. Blog posts are meant to be short, and comments are meant to be shorter. When I see a really long comment, I wonder if the writer isn't a little overly devoted to his or her idea and how their time is being allocated.
- A heaping tablespoon of clear and grammatical expression. Okay, I'm a professor, but when I see spelling and grammatical mistakes — even online — I discount the rest of the message. This is not entirely fair to non-native speakers of English, so I sometimes discount this factor a bit for exotic-sounding names.
- A pinch of humor. Again, this is blogging and online commentary we're discussing. So everything should be kept a bit light. I'm not talking about knock-knock jokes, but rather an occasional wry comment or even a pun....MORE
