Blog Comments Debate

There’s been a debate going on the last few days over the usage of comments on blogs. I basically agree with Venomous Kate’s view on whether blogs need comments. And Unbound Spiral adds some good, uh, comments. But I’d like to add a little twist. There’s a serious problem with TrackBack. Even for the Movable Type(MT) blogs that have it, most implement it poorly. Notice how if you go to the page for an individual post (the permalink) you can’t tell how many TrackBacks there are. That is, unless the blog owner has modified the individual entry archive template. This is an oversight in the default MT templates, IMO. But what I’d love to see is TrackBacks listed alongside (with) comments, as I have done on this blog. For MT blogs, this can be done via Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments Plugin. As Kalsey says:

TrackBacks are comments. They are comments left on someone else’s site rather than your own, but they are comments nonetheless. Movable Type makes a distinction between entry comments and TrackBacks that seems artificial, and it made more sense to me to have TrackBack ping data appear within the comments portion of a Movable Type site.

Hopefully MT will put this functionality into a future version.

For a (kinda) related discussion, check out How to Save the World’s article ‘What the Blogosphere Needs More Of’.