Evil Home Stereo

Yesterday at the blogger meeting — some thirty people standing/sitting around at the Marktstube (still owned by Luka Skywalker?), drinking, talking, and stuff. Most of them with some quickly written stickers sticking somewhere, carrying their names. The other few people in the room stealing glances, whispering. Who are those weird people? Participants of a dentist’s seminar on dope? Some weird single meetup at “the one and only anti-German salon“? “No, we are bloggers…” somebody answered. Haha. Hm, that joke’s getting old.

At some point I noticed that there was no list of participants like last year. What a pity. And no blog URLs on the stickers. People not geeky enough? Maybe. Not all blogger are geeks (neither do all geeks blog). That’s old news.

New news to me was that blogging isn’t about what I felt it is about. To me the blog is more or less a notepad where from time to time I scrabble down an idea, some weird thing I experienced, something I stumbled on. A place to express yourself when you feel like it. I mostly read technical English blogs, maybe I read the wrong ones. Or English blogs are different. According to J�rg’s theory they indeed are — Germany is a hamlet; when you blog in German, your audience isn’t that big compared that of USians blogging in English. Whatever it is, at least German blogs aren’t about what I thought they were. They are about community. Knowing each other, discussing stuff. That’s what they told me. Not for lurking, catching new ideas, old news, and stuff. Apropos discussing…

This blog doesn’t feature comments as you might have noticed. I had a great deal of discussions about this yesterday night. First with neezee, J�rg and some other guy whose name I forgot (we’re the four people in the background of this photo, he was the one between neezee and me — if I had comments somebody could tell me who he was). Later with Lo�c.

One reason why I don’t have comments is that this blog isn’t much more than a bunch of PHP scripts hacked together in a few hours (yes, neezee, believe it or not, I blog with vim).

But there’re other reasons, one of them I hinted before; if people comment on the stuff you wrote you have to write back. Ok, you dont have to. But I think its rude if you don’t do so.

And this leads to the second reason. The comment function of all blogs I know work like a web forum. And web forums (stupid English plural) simply suck. Their handling on the one side but much more their linear style. Discussions aren’t linear. They become threaded, especially when they get longer. Look at the Usenet. Look at mailinglists. And mind those stupid “@the guy who said something three posts ago:” in web forums. Those are the main reasons why I don’t offer comments.

But there came neezee. And said straight ahead: “Your blog is no blog. A blog is about discussion. Period. What you have is a log or something but no blog.” Uuuhh… that hurled my blog directly into an identity crisis. Is this a blog or not? Do I have to change the headline to “my logged place”? Will anybody respect me? But Nico says it is one. I think.

Comments? Oh… I need comments…

Jim just sent me a mail and told me that the guy on the photo I talked to is kid37. I think he even told me his real name. I have a horrible memory for names. And numbers. And stuff.

I really need to implement some comment functionality. Maybe I can do it via a mail interface. Interesting idea, got to sleep over it…

If I ever have a comment feature, it definitely won’t be like the Blogger.de (or whatever it will be called after it was bought by Google); ie. it won’t force you to create an account…