State of the Blogosphere

Harry's Place has a post that's spawned an interesting discussion thread on the power and pitfalls of the Blogosphere. There's a particularly interesting comment about, well, comments.

One problem with internet social groupings such as blogs, Usenet and message boards is that they tend to deteriorate over time - obnoxious posters drive away all of the sensitive folks. Blogs have a big advantage in that the owner of the blog can moderate and throw out the yahoos, but when they don't take that responsibility the results are always ugly.

That's more or less what happened to Blogcritics.org, which became so overrun by the worst kind of trolls I've had to give up on it. Although making one of the very worst of the trolls into the Politics editor probably didn't help. What was the site owner thinking?

I can understand why Norm doesn't have comments. My own readership is so small that comment trolls aren't really a problem (lthough I wish I could say the same for spam)