Why I want this to be a dialogue and not a diary.

I’ve been posting on this domain for some time, and one of the most difficult things is… to do so consistently, and by that I mean every day. I don’t think I’m doing this by chance, but by choice. Sometimes you just don’t want to say anything. A break would be nice, but sometimes you just have to say it. And your idea formulates over time.

But there were a couple of problems I had to figure out.

In the past, blogs or weblogs as they were originally called - were like a “log”, or diary of your thoughts. It matured beyond that. In fact, even today some people still use it as a chronological record.

And it’s evident from their use of permalink (URLs) which contain the date element in that. Over time, and based on some (then) SEO recommendations, I removed the date part, the idea was that search engines could figure out when it was published and how fresh it was.

But imagine if you published something, it would not be read again on first take if the date was given, as something that was old, or stale even though the content was still relevant today. Also, if there was an update, the URL wouldn’t really be changed, so that would date you.

The other problem I had to contend with was whether to include a comments or not. In the past, I used to entertain it. But as the blog got comments, and enriched the site (some cases not) - it did create a conversation that was public, but one that forced me to spend time in moderation and responding. Also, it was all on the site, and not really expanding the conversation to other places.

Following the lead from Seth Godin, I’ve turned it off. Even now Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Wordpress doesn’t use comments on his site. So how do you entertain a dialogue, if the site only contains your posts and no comments?

Well those who wish to share, could take the conversation to Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin and by sharing the link and commenting on it, a larger audience would also see the post. I like this, though not many will go to the trouble of doing that, even though setting up an account with those sites is easy.

Those who do go to the trouble, feel strongly about their comment and took some effort to publish their thoughts, just as I took some effort to publish mine. I respect there comments even more.

So what do you think? Should this be a diary or a dialogue?