Blogs are a Two way Medium
I once had a friend who advocated a free society, a bottom up approach to living and pushing digital technology so that these ideas could strive and feed a free society. A discussion on one of his articles on one of his blogs did garner a lot of attention and spawned lots of unregulated discussion, a fruitful discussion among what one would think are part time intellectuals or generally people who have a belief - something that is not found very often in this society of blind followers. Sadly the aforementioned person did not fully understand that he was using a two way medium that does spawn those discussions and only if it does it has a chance to live up to its full potential as a new medium that breaks free with traditional push only media. I am sad to see this blindness taking hold instead of trying to find a technical solution he switched back to the push-publishing dark-ages killing the quite violent but also fruitful discussion in its tracks, since his is no blog anymore by definition but rather a static internet dark age website it also disappears from my blog roll - I am deeply disappointed not only at his standpoint in the discussion (again this is is debatable and everyone is entitled to his standpoint as long as it is his own and everyone has supporting arguments which in this discussion every side had more or less good ones) but much much more to his control approach toward his blog readers. Yes a discussion like this is scary and sure I would have understood if this was getting into a huge flame war - but it wasn´t. Every side - emotionally charged - presented their case with lots of good questions to the other side and most of the time things stayed pretty much on topic (so the topic was wider then the blog entry imposed). There was simply no need to cut off the discussion nor was there a need to cut of all comments on the blog.