Dave has some definite ideas about comments at his blog.

This site is far too incoherent for that. I've spent a lot of years depending on the kindness of strangers and the better angels of your nature. Sometimes it works!

Comments

[Roch101]

Clearly, your blog serves a different purpose than Dave's. Yeah, you could get all hard ass about it being YOURS, but you've cast it in a different role not well served by that attitude.

[Ed Cone]

Right, and Dave is clear that what works for his blog doesn't work for everyone else.

This blog's purpose is murky, even to me. Or, maybe more accurately, it has multiple purposes.

Looking at comments at other old school blogs, I see poles at Atrios (hundreds of comments per post, very high noise to signal ratio in terms of relevance to the posts) and Instapundit (usually no comments allowed).

[polifrog]

At some point comment quality seems to deteriorate inversely with readership. However, some blogs such as huffingtonpost have managed to herd the cats and drift into something decidedly less bloggy and possibly profitable.

[Dave Winer]

If these comments are representative of what you get here, then you don't need any rules. I get a lot of people giving speeches that they could give anywhere that have nothing to do with what's on my blog. That's just spam. If it were mail, people wouldn't have any trouble seeing it.

[Thomas]

I never bother reading the comments at Atrios. It seems like an ongoing contest to be the first commenter on every post and, as you say, mostly off point.

[polifrog]

Dave:

If these comments are representative of what you get here, then you don't need any rules.

For my part my comments can get a bit wordy here at Cone's, but I always try to respond to the responses, even when they drift off topic.