Sarabian has replied to my previous rant. My issue is with the phrase
I think comments are losing their purpose as the weblogging world progresses, using tools such as referrers, pingbacks and trackbacks.
Of which I saw the implication as “comments are being, and should be, replaced by backlinks”, if that isn’t what he intended to say, then I aplogise for aiming my rant at him. The point is, somewhere buried in the text, that I’m not talking to webloggers, not primarily, nor even mostly. Most of the people who come here do not have a weblog of any kind, although some have a livejournal or something, but not a medium where they respond to such things, and so saying the above is roughly saying “You can’t talk to me if you arn’t in my gang”. ie, the gang of people with the time and inclination to write weblogs.
Finally, and possibly more importantly, people are far more likely to use comments than email.