(Via) Thirteen Blog Clichés and I'm happy to note that I'm not guilty of any of them. (Any more.) (Not even #11.)

Nor #13, "No comments allowed", any more. But I don't agree with him that "a blog without comments is not a blog." He gives a nod to "exceptions for massively popular blogs where comments clearly don't scale" but he doesn't know the half of it. A popular blog that posts controversial content and permits comments will get swarmed with hostility, and it wears on you. Over a period of days, even weeks, you can ignore it. But constantly being beat up, even by people you don't respect, gets really old.

Believe me, I've been there. Even without permitting comments, just the hostile email wore. Being in the Technorati Top #100 is less nice than you might think.

What I've got going these days is a lot more fun. A core group of us who all blog, read each others' blogs, and share a significant interest. A rather larger group of readers who tend to read all of us. Non-controversial subject matter, and relatively small overall readership.

I think Shamus has noticed what he lost when "DM of the Rings" got so popular. He went from a typical post having 5-10 comments to a typical post having more than a hundred. You know what? It stops being fun to read your comments when there are so many.

He says that when "DM of the Rings" ends (another three weeks or so) he's going to do another capture-comic but he's going to give it its own home. My guess is he's made a deal with Pixy and it'll be a mee.nu blog -- but we'll all find out when the time comes. But it won't be on "Twenty Sided" and I get the impression that Shamus is hoping that his readership on that will decline again, back to the cozy comfortable level of the old days.

[Yeah, yeah, #10. Cut me some slack. I don't do it very often, and anyway it's one of our shared interests.]

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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