Honor System??

So, Seth likes the honor system... but maybe only for people who want to try products online, not for allowing comments?

Fred comments about Seth (and Marc) not allowing comments on their blog:

I know there are plenty of high profile bloggers who don't have comments, including my inspiration for blogging, Seth Godin. But when you turn off comments, the blog stops being a blog in my mind and becomes a publication. Seth and Marc will say that if you have a high profile blog, you get too many nasty, mean, ugly comments and spam to boot. True. I've had the same problems, maybe not of the same magnitude. I don't care. You have to deal with it.

And I'm back to thinking about categorizing blogs with individual identities. Seth and Marc want to write, and their blog posts are like that - you have to _read_ them. It's not twitter-style instantaneous comments about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. These guys post in-depth essays with a specific purpose. Not that Fred doesn't do that, but it's clear that the nature of his writing is different. It seems at least there is a "lighter", more interactive feel with his posts. Getting comments about an essay is a lot different than getting a "Dude, I think that song ROCKS too!" comment about a song posting.

I wonder if niches will appear within the blogging space based on blog purposes? If I'm a writer, I can have specific functions to manage honorable feedback, to sell/cross-sell my content (not ad driven!), and publish groupings of content to Amazon and B&N. If I'm an interactive person who is "social blogging", there are the other tools - twitter, integrates social networking components; for deeper levels of interaction.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out...