With the huge launches of news weblogs like Gawker Media’s Sploid and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, you’d think that the medium they’re utilizing would actually be utilized. Weblogs are all about two-way communication between writers and readers, but commenting features on these two sites are noticeably absent. What happened here was that they wanted to exploit the hype and media attention surrounding weblogs for their gain, without all the aftertaste of reader opinions. What a waste.
Denton’s other sites don’t have comments, so this post isn’t specifically directed towards him. He sees weblogs as another outlet for media advertising dollars, so more power to him. Unfortunately, Arianna was pimping the weblog medium so much that I fully expected reader interaction on The Huffington Post, but I was completely incorrect. She had an opportunity to really move weblogs into the limelight with a way for readers to directly talk to politicos, but she squandered it.
Hilary Rosen recently discussed how DRM is craptacular for her and her iPod which is totally hypocritical because Rosen was the head of the RIAA when she forced Jobs into a DRMd music store.
A growing number of blogs are blowing up with comments about how big of a hypocrite she is, and how she now realizes what we’re thinking about when we used to hear her speak, however she will never hear any of this feedback. If there were a way to leave comments on the blog entry itself, she might actually gain some insight into what it means to be a consumer in a digital music world. But, Arianna squandered the entire medium, and now her site is just another frequently updated site without the added benefit of comments to spice it up. I’ll pass.
It seems as though Google has found comments on at least one of the Huffington Post entries, but Arianna and Hilary must have had an “oh shit” moment when hundreds of comments came pouring in essentially ripping her a new one and shut it all down.