The ettiquette of responding to commenters

Apart from the obvious one of actually responding in the first place, I have a mild beef with the way some site owners deal with debate in an comments thread on their blogs.  I count three different ways of dealing with a comment thread:

1. Quote directly from the comment and respond to the issues raised in the quote.
2. Append your response to the end of the quote
3. Append your response underneath each paragraph of your visitor's comment so that your responses intersperse themselves between his points

I'm of the firm opinion that (1) is the best option. It has the (for me) huge advantage that you can get notified of new comments on the thread using a comment tracker like co.mments.com, and allows your commenter to make his points in his own way. The disadvantage is that threads can sometimes get a bit difficult to follow, particularly if they are long and complex. This is, however, the approach adopted by most site owners.

(2) Adding responses to the end of comments is also fine - it makes the thread rather easier to follow but you may not know if your comment has been responded to. Tim Worstall is probably the best known exponent of this approach.

You might make a case that (3) - interspersing responses throughout the comment - has certain advantages, in that the site owner can respond to each point made by the commenter. However I think its use should be discouraged, because it becomes something akin to a fisking of the commenter. It seems to me that a polite welcome to a commenter involves letting them say their piece, allowing other readers to appreciate the their argument in the best light possible. Interspersing ones own responses seems to me to be just plain bad manners - it's the equivalent of interrupting them at the end of every sentence. I know of two sites that use this approach - Real Climate and William Connelly (who is, coincidentally a Real Climate contributor). Are there any others?

I like this

House of Dumb has coined (I think) a lovely expression for right-wing blogs - the "dextrosphere". The beauty of it is, of course, that places like this are now "the sinistersphere".

Quaequam

I've often wondered what "quaequam" means - as in James Graham's Quaequam Blog. My latest theory is that it must be something along the lines of "eviscerate with maximum prejudice" which is what he has done to Tom Watson's ridiculous attempt to justify his support for the FoI amendment bill. Watson is surely the only man in the UK blogosphere who can rival Mike Ion for toe-curlingly unquestioning party loyalty. Truly a revolting specimen.

No feed, no read

RSS. It's not difficult, is it? REALLY SIMPLE syndication, yes?

So why, oh why do otherwise well-organised campaigning organisations completely fail to publish a feed? Can it have escaped their notice that this is the way people do things now? The Taxpayers' Alliance is a case in point. This is allegedly one of the best-organised campaign groups to have emerged in recent years. They seem to have an unerring ability to get themselves in the MSM, to be sure. But their "blog" doesn't have a single solitary feed. What are they thinking of? I'd read it every day if only I knew there was something there for me to look at. As it is, I'm there once every six months or so. What a waste.

Education Otherwise is another. Get with the twenty-first century guys!

There are lots more too, but I can't remember who the hell they are. And there's a lesson there isn't there. If I can't remember who you are when I really want to slag you off, what are the chances that I'll be able to recall your name when I'm interested (but only vaguely) in what you have to say. 

Get a feed...please?

Well that was exciting...

The post before last seems to have excited an awful lot of interest - there were more hits in the last twenty-four hours than in a typical week. We're not used to this level of interest here in the episcopal palace. So,  thanks are due to The Englishman, Junkscience.com and, as ever, the Adam Smith Institute for the links. Expect some interesting developments on the climate front in coming weeks too.

Is this a first?

I'm sure it can't be, but I can't think of another occasion on which an MP, let alone a shadow minister, has left comments on a blog. Regardless of whether it's a first or not, congratulations are due to Nearly Legal for getting a visit and a comment from Oliver Heald, who is apparently the shadow Constitutional Affairs bod.

Politicians have got into blogs in a small, and decidedly unsuccessful way so far. This could be because blogging is about crazed loners sounding off their dangerous ideas on subjects on which they are completely unqualified to comment. And of course we all know that politicians are the archetypal crazed loners, remarkable only for the dangerousness of their ideas and their extraordinary ignorance. When they make their opinions public, our understandable reaction is a bored "Tell us something we don't know".

So perhaps Oliver Heald has the right idea. (A politician with the right idea? Whatever next?) The way forward could be for the political classes to comment on other people's blogs rather than writing their own. It makes them look as if they are responding to people's concerns rather than articulating their own prejudices. It might make them appear as if they are servants - public servants - rather than a bunch of greedy charlatans on the make.

It's a neat trick really. It's almost a pity to have seen through it.
 

New in the blogroll

I haven't added anyone to the blogroll for quite a whle. Not because I haven't come across anything interesting, but because I'm too bone idle. A few new ones added today.

Search

The clever people at Squarespace have added search functionality to the system, so you can now trawl the blog for my previous pearls of wisdom. Link is in the navigation bar.

Guido & White

I've just watched the studio discussion between Guido and Michael White, several days after everyone else. Something Michael White said stood out to me as being a little odd. He was talking about Prescott's little problems last year and said:

If he's such a villain, how come we've just voted against ... against there being a casino in Manchester.

Firstly, "we've just voted...". Who's we? Labour? Is Michael White openly aligning himself with Labour? That would kind of prove Guido's point wouldn't it - that the press are too close to the politicians? Or does he mean the House of Lords? He's not actually been ennobled yet despite all his brown-nosing editorials, but perhaps he knows something we don't.

Either way he doesn't obviously give the impression of being a fearless independent journalist.

Recess Monkey & the wisdom of crowds

Amidst all the hilarity over Recess Monkey's "Maggie Dead" post, the question was put of whether this discredited bloggers. Certainly Iain Dale commenting on the Blogger TV show on 18 Doughty Street thought so.

I must say that anyone who thinks this is missing the fundamental point about the blogosphere. Wisdom is found in the crowd as a whole, not in any particular member of it. For every sloppy blogger claiming that Margaret Thatcher is dead, there is another fool saying that she will live for ever. Both are wrong but their errors cancel each other out. The crowd as a whole moves quickly to the more accurate position that she is alive, but she's getting on a bit. 

So as I commented on Blogger TV, the blogosphere did exactly what it is supposed to do. We shouldn't expect any more from it. 

Blogs for granny

My mother keeps asking me how I know so much more about what's going on than she does. "Blogs", I say. "Which ones?", she asks.

So I thought I might set up a Netvibes account for her. But who should I put on it? Suggestions please. (Sorry DK, you're too sweary).