I read the same comment from Des as Jill reacted to, but I saw it first on Tinka's page. My reaction to his criticism of the lack of comments was identical to Jill's, possibly because comments or no comments is something Jill, Hilde and I discussed pretty extensively when we created blogonblog (We initially tried to involve Hilde in that).

Blogonblog has comments, and they were put there in order to give us a tool through which we could quickly and easily comment on each other's posts, as well as give other bloggers/readers/non-bloggers who might be interested in contributing to a meta-blogging discussion a way to give feed-back. The comment function is still there, and both Jill and I check on that blog regularly to see if there are any changes (and we have agents doing the checking for us, in case we should grow lax), but they didn't really work well. We had some very nice comments and some not so useful, but email and checking links from other blogs was a much better way to get feed-back on what we were discussing.

During that initial discussion both Jill and I opted for no comments on our "personal" blogs. Jill/txt and thinking with my fingers are our gardens, they are not public parks - exactly because they are not strictly academic, even if leusche claims that jill/txt is the most rigorously academic blog around.

This blog of mine is a way to communicate opinions and experiences which I'd like to share with others, and although I most of the time try to make those experiences interesting for others who like MUDs and media theory, there's more to me than being academic. Over the last month I have found that the intense writing which I do offline makes me less phrone to write academic posts here - the blog has become the place where I go to breathe, relax... and if Jill, Lisbeth or Hilde are around I'll bring a pot of tea as well and just chat or listen to what they have to say.

I want to feel free to do that, without needing to maintain an ongoing discussion with just anyone who might be passing by. Perhaps it's the introvert Norwegian in me who thinks like this; the one who maintains the personal space in all public places, doesn't meet the eyes of strangers on the street and looks offended if spoken to in a personal manner by shop-keepers. I know it's not the academic - when I think like an academic I want comments, I want attention, I want to control the discussion and keep it on my turf. I want to be the one to design the frame-work and define the limits. And that is what a comment system does: It keeps the discussion within the predefined limits of the blog in question. The moment you take my words to your turf and quote or link, it's out of my control. You might even "burn" me, if that is your pleasure.