URLs are important. Most companies are beginning to realise this fact, and that just because they have a website (http://www.thisismycoolcompany.8m.freeserve.co.notreally.flash.fuq) could not be good enough. They need a DOT COM!!!! Hah, I have one, it’s nothing special. (Why do I have a dot com? because Aquarionic Designs was once my trading name, and will be again. What’ll happen to the site then, I’m not sure). But URLs go deeper than that, Being able to understand what a link means (/archive/2002/10/30/, for example, is pretty useful) means that users can – if they want – bypass your carefully constructed navigation system because they already know where to go. There are bad aspects to this, particularly if you are relying on things on a public medium remaining secret, as Intentia did, you may get irritated with the system. There are other points, of course. The fact that Moveable Type puts it’s comments form in a place where a script – as well as a person – knows where it is without even scanning leads to Comment Spamming. This has lead to many weighty opinions on the subject of should there be comments on weblogs? Or have we moved beyond that, into the realms of Pingback and Trackback as Sarabian suggests?
Sod that. That’s elitism, it’s insulting, and it’s the very thing I blasted LiveJournal for a few months back – the idea that only people in their little community have the right to comment on pages. I can discuss Sarabian’s entry without using his commenting system, and he can know about it by the magic of Pingback. But say Mad Bull linked to me, discussing my entry. I don’t read his weblog (I just pulled it out of the random blogsnob box to the left), and I can’t trust my referer logs anymore. And that’s the people who have weblogs, or diaries of some kind, what about the people who leave comments that by no means would warrant a full entry in their own mouthpiece, even if they have one. There is a large difference between “Comment”, which is what I allow, and “Response”, which is what things like ping/trackback are designed for.
Some weblogs don’t do comments, Mark being a prime example, because they don’t fit with the style of the blog, or because the author doesn’t want them, but claiming some evolutionary advantage in not allowing people who don’t have their own weblog to comment is not good.
