The day geekland disappeared up its own *rse

The discussion (sic) about who owns the comments on a blog, off a blog, whether a comment is creative content in its own right or not, who has the right to edit a comment, et etc, that has been rolling around for the last day or so has been truly.....well, its enough to make anyone want to give up blogging and run a mile from fair Geekland.

But its worth recording the story, simply because it is indicative of a mindset one can get into if you take all this stuff too seriously.

At its root is that various aggregation systems are essentially trying to create content (and thus some semblance of flippable value) for themselves by "capturing the conversation" - so instead of commenting on this post on this blog, you comment on it in say Friendfeed or whatever. All very well, but when a blogger cuts his blog's line into Friendfeed, various others who were commenting on that blog post, in Friendfeed, lost their comments.

Well.

This started a whole raft of Blogma discussions - is a comment creative, who owns it, does a blog have a right to delete comments on the blog, who is liable for libellous comments, should the Creative Commons policy be changed - and other angels on pinheads sorts of discussions. I like Steven Hodson's Grumpy Summary

Anyway, turns out that as bloggers we are definitely at fault because it is not clear to you, gentle reader, what the commenting policy is on Broadstuff.

So here it is:

1. You may comment anywhere you darn well like but commenting here strokes the ego far more
2. If you comment on this blog, play nice (please).
3. Thus, if we think the comment is spam or libellous or stupid, or I just think you are an *sshole, I reserve the right to delete the comment on this blog. The decision, however apparently irrational and capricious, is final. Unmarked £50 notes can influence decisions
4. If the comment is made on this blog, I will do my best to respond. This should take the form of rational argument but can equally be gibberish or....irony
5. But, I really cannot be *rsed to go chasing and responding to comments made elsewhere in any way. Life, as they say, is too short.

Seems like a plan.

Oh - and one more thing - we reserve the right to flatter and paste any comment in any blog post......

Update - Disqus, which is essentially a walled garden comments aggregator, has setu up a Commentors bill of rights over here: It Sez:

I’m going to make an initial attempt to materialize what some rights should be.

a) The ability to edit and remove their comments
b) Access to all of their comments, even if it has been deleted on a blog
c) The right to use their own comments as blog posts. After all, a commenter is just a publisher not writing on his own website.
d) A life for the comment beyond a single blog. I want to take my comments with me, even if the blog shuts down.

This may seem threatening to the publisher, but it really isn’t. A commenter should have rights to what they post, but bloggers should still have control over content that appear on their blogs. Bloggers should still control:

a) Whether or not someone is allowed to comment on his blog
b) The deletion of a comment
c) The modification of a comment, as long as the original copy is still accessible and the edit is transparent

My thoughts are, based purely on what Serendipity (our blog software) will do:

1a) No. My blogging software won't let that happen, and we ain't giving commentators full admin rights. Worst case, email us to change it.
1b) No. Ditto blogging software issues. Make your own copy, we're not going to put an admin load on ourselves to manage commentators.
1c) Absolutely
1d) You are welcome to take your comments if Broadstuff shuts down, but I ain't going manually through 2,000 odd comments to return 'em. Make a copy if its valuable to you.

2a) Agreed
2b) Agreed
2c) I'll only mod a comment if the author wants it.

Now, by my answers to 1 above, I have clearly played into the hands of the aggregator agenda, but it would be impossible not to without being economical with the truth, because most blogging software today doesn't do No's 1 a,b and d (hence the aggregator existing), and as this blog is an amateur endeavour I'm not taking on that admin load. As and when Serendipity's hive decides to implement something like this I'll add it, until then its on our roadmap

In fact, this is a "be careful what you wish for" thing, in that by increasing my cost of blogging, I may choose to manage that by (i) exiting the market (or exiting commenting more likely) because I can't afford the load, (ii) limiting commenting to a manageable level in some way or (iii) seeking to extract the extra cost from the commentator in some way

The secondary thought therefore is that those requirements are fine, but that is in our "platinum" Service Level Agreement....it costs £10 a month per commentator, and that will pay for the time to manage that. The "Gold" service is free and is stated as above.

So here's the counter-deal - we want commenting to be as open access as possible (no barriers my end) but the quid pro quo for a free service is we want as light a touch in comment management as possible. As technology comes along to help we'll take it, but the rules are these:

(i) The technology is open to all, no walled gardens
(ii) The technology is open source, no proprietary lock ins, and users can build on it.

Fairy nuff?