Yesterday Google posted the yearly stats for the Official Google Blog. Not bad – 294 posts, 7.6 million unique visitors and 15 million page views. Technorati ranks the Google Blog as the 16th largest among all blogs, and it is by far the most popular official company blog. Just one accidental deletion and a couple of hacks added a bit of spice and drama.
But today bloggers are starting to ask if the Official Google Blog is even an actual blog. The reason? It doesn’t allow readers to leave comments. The Official Google blog does list links to other sites referencing any given post (a sort of trackback), but that’s it. The conversation ends there.
Yahoo, in contrast, does allow reader comments on their official blogs. At times it has been painful for them, but I believe having this direct user feedback mechanism is helping them make better products.
Other prominent bloggers have removed comments, too. Seth Godin, no. 19 on the Technorati list, rarely allows comment on his blog. He says that comments affect what he writes, and “So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.”
The current definitions of “blog” in most dictionaries don’t mention reader comments at all when defining the term. Wikipedia says only that “the ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.” According to these sources, the minimum requirement for a web site to be a blog is that it have content, and that it be sorted in reverse chronological order.
I believe the term “blog” means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume. We’ve allowed comments here on TechCrunch since it started. At times, user comments can be painful to deal with. But they also keep the writer honest, and make the content vastly more interesting.
Should the definitions of “blog” be revised to exclude journals that do not allow reader comments? Yeah, absolutely. And Google may think so, too. At the end of their post, they write “And before long, perhaps you can begin leaving comments directly. We’re working on that.”
What do you think? Leave a comment, or answer the poll below.
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Not a requirement, but comments enhance content dramatically
- Comments are not a requirement for blogs
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Without comments, it isn’t a blog
Total Votes: 3639
Started: December 31, 2006

Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called “
Part of the problem is that Google has always held itself to a higher standard than other companies. We took them seriously when they said their corporate motto is “




Austria-based 

Metrics company Hitwise writes a sensational 
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The company is also launching a number of widgets that will pull data from all of your social networks and allow you to present it on another website. The first widget will be a “portable profile” with links to your various networks.






Once files are uploaded, they can be converted to all of the usual formats and then downloaded. And they’ve also used RSS intelligently here as well – they’ve created a RSS feed for all of a user’s converted files, so they can simply be gathered from a feed reader without going back to the Hey!Watch site each time. 












