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by James Robertson.
Original Post: A few passing comments
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Gordon Weakliem hits on a number of things I thought I'd comment on. To wit:
That's exactly the problem with comments: you lose control of your content. It's just not worth it to spend any amount of time composing a comment when you're losing control over whether or not the comment even will be published. It's like sending a letter to the editor: they get thousands a day, yet maybe a dozen get published daily. Why bother expending all that effort? It's amazing the practice has survived. On the other hand, when you post to your own weblog, you own the content, and nobody can take away the fact that you've had your say.
It's actually an open question as to who owns the content (depending on who you host with, and whether it's a corporate blog or not). Information Week has an entire article on this:
The trend is forcing IT, human resources, and legal departments to come up to speed quickly. The issue of who owns the copyrights to Weblogs, in particular, seems to have caught some people off guard. Mark Potts, chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's management software business, says that he would be surprised if his Weblog, which is hosted on HP's Web site, was copyrighted by his employer. "That's an interesting question," he says.
But, after checking the company's policy, an HP spokeswoman discovered that the rights to Potts' content belong to the company and not the CTO. "HP owns the copyright for anything written by an HP employee published on an HP Web site, including blog entries," the spokeswoman says via E-mail.
So interestingly enough, you may not own the content. Information Week points out that Microsoft is not being clear about ownership on the new Spaces system - and I'd be curious to know what anyone's actual rights are with hosted solutions like BlogSpot (etc). It's just not clear at the moment. Having stirred a can of worms there, let me go on to Gordon's next comment:
One other trend that really bothers me is the current fad of using CAPTCHA in comments, and in particular, the fact that these systems almost never have any sense of identity to them. That is, once I've passed the CAPTCHA test, I have to pass it every time I visit the site. That's a serious disincentive to post a comment, particularly when some of these weblog operators generate CAPTCHAs with pretty extreme distortions.For my part, I disable comments on posts older than a certain threshold. These sort of protections are never applied to Comment API implementations (realistically, how could they be?). One really has to wonder when we'll see widespread spamming via the Comment API; probably around the time that CAPTCHA and comment expiration become widespread enough to cause some real pain for the spammers.
Hmm - I have no idea why Gordon thinks that the CommentAPI should be wide open while the rest of the system gets locked down. In this server, comments all pass through the same check/save system, whether they come from the CommentAPI or from the web form. Are other systems really so broken that the same isn't true? Makes me wonder...
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