Interactive

Sunday, 24th August 2008

As you'll have noticed, the comments section has finally been closed down. Just before the plug was pulled, this arrived from a Coffee House reader:

It's the comments sections which, with some reservations, make blogs - otherwise what's the point of a blog? I note though that your posts are generally fairly free of comment. I hope you're not just closing down comments because their evident paucity suggests that your posts do not sufficiently engage readers' interest. That would be a somewhat fugitive reason.

Thanks for the charitable thoughts. No, it's nothing to do with numbers. Many of the sites I like most don't have comments, as a matter of fact. I just don't happen to enjoy sifting through the responses, especially as there's a particularly intolerant tone to about 80 per cent of them. (One of the problems with blogs, in my experience, is that a lot of people are in too much of a hurry to read posts properly.) I don't think the success or failure of a blog has much to do with catering to pub bores, to be honest. Thank you to the remaining 20 per cent of readers for being so civil, lively and informative. If people still want to send in responses, they can use the mailbox, which I'll check as often as I can. The address is clivecomments@aol.com.