Whooee! Well, I agree about comments but there’s more than just allowin’ ‘em. The comments gotta attract and engage readers with differing views. And them reader-commenters gotta be haffway literate an’ articulate. The commenters gotta keep away from ad hominies an’ rah-rah cheerleader stuff. The author of the OP has gotta chime in every once in a while outta respect fer his readership and to defend his thesis.

I reckon the subject of the OP needs to be provocative enough to invite a good commentin’ gabfest.

It’s all about the conversation. That’s what makes it bloggy, sez I. Attractin’ and nurturin’ sensible, interestin’ conversation is a big part of it.

Boogers like Warren Kinsellerfeller and Paul Wells and Rick Mercer who don’t allow comments and don’t foster conversation are boogers who don’t get it. They see boogs as simply another venue fer publicatin’ their pontifications. Without allowin’ reader comments, they’re sayin’ the readers ain’t worthy of writin’ on their precious boogs.

I don’t comment on every boog I read. Far from it. But even so, if a booger don’t allow comments, that ain’t a boog I read too often.

A little bit o’ funny stuff don’t hurt, neither. I reckon its a good thing when regular reader-commenters feel like they are personally acquainted with the boog writer.

JB

To expand on Raphael’s first point: I agree that a “good” blog is actually written, as opposed to assembled.

To this interesting and growing list I’m going to add something basic: the blogger should be able to write. I don’t just mean mastery of grammar and syntax; I like a writer with a recognizable voice and style. There are a lot of bloggers (and writers in other media) I disagree with vehemently on almost everything, but I still read and enjoy because they’re good writers.

Activity. I know good blogging takes time and maybe its asking too much, but I prefer sites that are regularly updated, hopefully daily.

Agreed about comments, but writing style is probably as important to me. Thinking about who I visit most regularly, I obviously like a slightly sardonic, humorous voice.

One that presents the issues from the viewpoint of a citizen, not of the politician. There are many things that make sense for politicians and party strategists that have no real meaning for the rest of us.

I find political blogs that focus too much on polling or the politician’s communication strategy or the optics of an issue to be a distraction. Like watching a game of hockey as opposed to being invited to play hockey.

The ability to have IP addresses captured to weed out sockpuppets and trolls would be nice…

HaloScan provides that capability and it is embeddable in Blogger.

dynamics. Without it you’re mediocre.
Allow as much and more as you can tolerate and deal with the fallout.
Who wants to return to a blogg that is static?

I’ll get to the point at hand, but just as an aside to answer Raphael’s questions… 1) You will unfortunately have to wave bye-bye to all of your old comments made under blogger. If that’s a sticking issue for you, then Haloscan isn’t for you. However, ask yourself whether they’re really all that precious and need to be saved for time immemorial… After a while, you may not think so. Besides, the longer you wait, the more of an impediment this becomes.

As for the “recent comments” feature, they do have a widget that will do this exactly the same way you presently have on your blog.

Uh yeah….

Problem with the Galloping Beaver is the tendency for rightwing derangement syndrome. Sometimes their members have the opportunity to offer insightful, balanced, researched criticism based on a variety of factual accuracies and irrefutable proofs.

But most of the time it’s ruined by their inflammatory rhetoric and tendency to get bogged down in the infantile lament of Bush and Harper. I much rather prefer a writer who can legitimately crush a political opponent using facts and reason.

Often I find skdadl to be a member of that crowd, but today he/she wrote an articulate and factually pertinent article at POGGE. I thought it was an excellent piece of information about the war in Afghanistan, the criticisms for why he/she doesn’t believe the war will work, and there was no infantile sloganisms and “BUSH kill UR babies” nonsense.

Well done, skdadl.

“You will unfortunately have to wave bye-bye to all of your old comments made under blogger.”

i noodled around with the template when i added haloscan, and managed to keep all of the old comments intact. can’t remember how i did it, though. stoopid weed….

KEvron

Oh, well if that’s the case then, I stand corrected. I was sure that’s what the instructions had said. Mind you, I really haven’t spend any time at all tinkering with it and it was an academic consideration on my present blog, but I’m planning on having a look at the options tomorrow in response to a request, so I’ll see what I can find on that.

This is a great question and there have been some great answers. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last week or so.

Looking through Balb’s summary I’m not sure that I can add any more attributes to the list. I’ll make a distinction though. I see many of the comments falling into two categories: (1) what makes a good blog and (2) what makes a good community.

A good blog can support a good community but it doesn’t have to: it can stand alone. A good community is almost always supported by good content but furthers it in the discussion.

For example, I read blogs by Wells, and Coyne and Sullivan and others because they have insightful things to say, they have an original voice, I trust them, they avoid being blindly partisan and offer reasoned and reasonable opinions. They don’t have great ( or sometimes any ) communities. I think they are great based on their content.

Great communities rely blog author(s) but they also rely on key members of the community.

The author(s) set the tone and encourage participation in two key ways: they set an example of a willingness to honestly consider alternate views and they participate directly in the discussion or at least make you feel like they are there or nearby and care what happens in the comments. If you do this long enough you will attract people who are willing to do the same.

To sustain a good community you need a handful of regular comment contributors who are like the author(s) and who help police the comments both by example and by discouraging bad behavior ( eg: flames )

I think there are a few attributes which create echo chambers which then attract trolls and flames. One is over-the-topness of content. If you take a position to an extreme then you will induce extreme reactions from ideological opposites. The other is attacking the argument and not attacking the person making the argument. This happens in obvious and more subtle ways. You can say “that person is an idiot …” or you can also say ( for example ) “Bush supporters are brownshirts”.

On the other hand, you don’t want milk-toast every day.

One thing that BBG did, and I consider BBG a late great community, was to pose questions in the posts and not just conclusions — much like you have done here and look at the excellent comments you’ve solicited. “Are Bush supporters really Brown Shirts?” sets off a different discussion than “Bush supporters are brownshirts”.

Very interesting distinction, Kevin, and one that may point to a real division of opinion. I see little in the other attributes that anyone would disagree with; but the comments/no comments question is a poser. Comment-less blogs are certainly “blogs”. But to me they reject the essence of this medium - its interactivity, with the concomitant capacity for iterative argument and instant peer-based fact-checking.

Red, I’ve passed your query on to the guys in the Engine Room.

Okay, I know you didn’t want examples, but I’ll give you one. My favourite political blog, alongside you, is Calgary Grit. It’s well written and conducted in a very respectful manner. And Dan Arnold manages to get that critical balance between expressing his own partisan desires, and acknowledging the political realities as others sees them. He’s able to assess when his opponents have made good strategic moves, and when his own party has made a blunder, and that lends him an immense amount of credibility when talking about politics. He knows how the game is played because he’s played it, and while he is nominally on one side, winning the game is not the most important aspect of his blog.

Similarly, Jason Cherniak is as good a writer as he is, and he is quite deep within the Liberal party apparatus to give us an interesting window on affairs. However, he is more partisan in his writing, such that I go to his site to see the Liberal point of view, whereas I go to Grit’s site to get a broader analysis.

Balb-

I don’t disagree with the value of comments. I think how you approach being great depends to some extent on what being great means to the authors and the visitors.

Some ( not me nor most of the people who visit here ) might consider the style of lgf as great or the style of SDA as great ( style meaning uncritical self-affirming monocultures ). The tactics of being successful with that goal are different than the tactics of the goals generally described in the comments above.

It’s a little off topic but I think communities only scale up to a certain size too.

“I was sure that’s what the instructions had said. “

if i recall correctly, they instruct you to replace a portion of the comments script of your template. i believe i simply included their scrpit with the original, then put blogger’s comments option into moderation, thus allowing the earlier comments to remain (viewable via post links/time stamps).

something like that. it’s all a blur, and i’m too lazy to go into my template and suss it out.

KEvron

I would like to add another criterion:

Technical competence.

Technical competence just adds that extra something to a blog. When a blogger knows how to manipulate HTML to add a link within the text, instead of just quoting it, that adds to the conciseness of the blog. It adds a touch of credibility to the blogger.

A lot of people who work in journalism crap all over blogs — and bloggers — as disruptive, their sites full of deliberate disinformation, hyperbole and invective instead of reasoned, rational discussion. They question the claims by some bloggers (and quite a few academics too) that they are part of a new and misunderstood aspect of public discourse, something they call “citizen” or “public” journalism.

These critics, mostly but not all in the traditional media, point to the lack of credibility of many bloggers, their lack of journalism training or adherence to basic principles of journalism, their snatch-and-grab of snippets from traditional media sites (aka real journalism) to offset their lack of original content, and their deliberate skewing of the information they present to push a particular agenda. I’ve heard it compared to a back alley full of cats in heat with a lot of hissing, spitting and loud noise but little else.

There’s more than a bit of hypocrisy in there. The MSM, some would say, is guilty of a lot of the same criticism. How much original reporting does any media outlet in any medium really do? Or do they snatch-and-grab a lot of pre-packaged PR fluff, wire service copy, and unattributed gossip (either political or entertainment) to fill its pages? Anyone who slams the Toronto Star or the National Post might understand.

Look at the number of MSM outlets that have setup personal and corporate blogs to tap into this wish by ordinary folks to have a say in whatever issue (even if they have nothing new or interesting to add). In some cases, such as the Globe and Mail’s comments sections after stories, some people have told me there’s little difference between the reader’s comments there and what they read (and are disgusted by) on a lot of private blogs. So even newspapers have trolls.

But few newspapers, the printed versions at least, have descended into platforms openly advocating racism, bigotry, misogyny, intolerance and other social evils in the name of generating readership or revenues. I wrote “few newspapers” — not all newspapers. I think — I hope — this is the big difference between so-called journalism and blogging.

I believe that the big difference, and disagree if you like, is that one is a social institution built over centuries in the hope that the exchange of rational, reasoned ideas in a public forum is good for political development. The other is not.

Not every letter to the editor should be published for all kinds of reasons, not least because the letter writer may be a paranoid idiot whose letter doesn’t make sense. There aren’t any rules or gatekeepers for bloggers - except for the bloggers themselves.

Some bloggers for instance, staunch defenders of their right to say even the most offensive crap anywhere they want without restriction, refuse to allow anyone else to comment on their own private sites. Others provide open platforms and try to engage readers and hopefully as many participants as possible with good writing and challenging ideas, with peer pressure as perhaps the only moderating factor. When applied to blogging, it’s the old adage that even pigs don’t shit where they eat.

So what makes a good political blog? I think that when the medium achieves some maturity it will be because those who present good ideas, expressed well, with civility and a measure of respect for the views of others, outshine and outdraw the crap that others profess as their right. It ain’t a right - it’s a privilege. I am not required, don’t need or want to read you if I find you don’t engage me or respect me.

Then again, there’s an amazing amount of crap that sells.

Good thread. I rarely comment anywhere because of the above.