To help me in the bold statement I have made here, let me step back and define what a blog means to me. A blog is a place where you can express your thoughts in a medium where others can read and leave feedback if they wish to. An arena for discussion and interaction so to speak. There are services that allow your blog to only be available to a select community and or group of friends, like the yahoo 360 and myspace blog components. In this case only selected people are able to see your blog, this is perfectly O.K. to me.
Now, back to blogger and why I don’t care to much for them. A blog using their service is available to be read by everyone, but not everyone can leave comments. There are many blogger based blogs out there including some very interesting ones on Kottu (www.kottu.org) that I like very much and would love to leave comments on, but alas cannot. You have to sign into your google account to leave a comment. This is very frustrating to me. I have not used blogger so I don’t know if it’s a setting that you can adjust or not, but every blogger based blog I’ve visited has been like this. This was not always the case, I remember that at one time you were able to leave a comment after proving you were a human by providing a name and email. Maybe I’m confused and that was never the case?
Either way, I think it’s extremely ineffective to have a blog and then cut out a whole segment of your readers from interacting with your blog by them not being able to leave comments. If you have a blogger based blog let me know what you think about this and please do check if there is a way in your control/admin section where you can allow readers to leave comments without having to log into a google account.
It doesnt have to be like that. You can set comment to come from a google account, Anonymous or an ID you make up then and there. Thing is I think most ppl leave the login thing on because they dont like anonymous callous comments and such
Don’t you think the whole point of having a blog and having it online accessible to everyone and anyone who has access to the internet is to allow them to post comments if they so wish? Some people are paranoid about privacy and dont want to use their real name which may be linked to their google account, or most people may not have a google account.
I think the better option is to allow everyone to post comments, and them moderate them. So if you think certain anonymous comments are callous delete them. Its a little more work on your end as the blog owner, but it makes your blog much more reader friendly and increases your reader base, which is the whole point of a blog.
I know that even if there is a really interesting article on a blooger blog, i will sometimes not read it because i know i wont be able to leave my feedback or the likes.
After starting with blogger I’ve realized that wordpress offers way more functionality… but it’s too late to change now.
As for your problem with commenting, there’s no such thing.
You can post comments by including your name and website, just like in wordpress. Try it.
Some people go to the extent of blocking anonymous comments. So in some blogger blogs you won’t be able to comment. But that doesn’t mean every blog is like that.