Caracas Chronicles

D. Pratt, whose brain PanfletoNegro came out of, weighs in on the Comment-via-Email thing:

Hasta los lurkers se manifiestan cuando cambias algo en una página que funcionaba bien. Bienvenidos al dolor.

I for one like the stuff. I think it’s genius that you make bloggers out of visitors. Outside of panfleto I don’t read comments. Comments are near to worthless when it’s not your site and you didn’t write the post. I like the fact that now you have more daily articles and it’s pretty obvious that you read your mail and value the responses. I’d rather have more Caracaschron than comments any day. Even if the articles are now written by visitors.

Every year there’s a debate on the blogosphere about turning comments on or off. I think it all comes down to what you want in a site. Do you want to create a community or do you want a soapbox (or, ahem, to “inform”). If it’s the former, turn the comments on and wait for the Lolcats, if it’s the latter, turn them off. If someone has an opinion, they have twitter, email, Facebook, etc. And if they really cannot contain themselves and want to bash your brains, they should open their own blog (Maracaibo Chronicles anyone? Oh noes! that’s Juan Cristobal’s secret project).