As much fun as blogs might be it is a simple truth that they are only as good as the comments that are made on any given post. This is something that beginning bloggers are told over and over - along with content is king. As such most bloggers will do what ever they can to make the process of making comments as easy as possible.
If this is the case why is it then that some of the big media type blogs; and some blogging platforms, make it such a daunting process. Its not like providing an easy to use commenting system is all that hard after all us lesser known bloggers do it without even thinking about it.
I started thinking about this when I was reading one of those ZDNet blogs and saw their commenting process; which in turn reminded me of a post by Eric (aka //engtech) over on Internet Duct Tape where he related the very painful process of trying to post a comment to the ZDNet blogs.
After entering the comment he wanted to leave he clicked the Add Your Opinion button and was faced with this (click for larger view)
As Eric says in his post
Congradulations ZDNet, you have a captcha worse than Typepad (and that’s saying a lot). No wonder the conversation is leaving the blogosphere.
It is not just the agonizing process they make you go through to add a comment either. It also the pointless format they use to see what comments have been made.
While the having to click through to another page to read the actual comments might do wonders for their advertising page views it really is nothing short of being extremely irritating.
There is no need to put your readers and potential commenters through this type of crap. Personally I think it is things like this that lead to conversation fragmentation far more than things like FriendFeed or Twitter.
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