How the invading army of twitter is killing comment on blogs

There has been a lot of comment recently about the death of comment particularly on blogs.

It is worth reading this article at Tech Crunch which puts the blame squarely on the bells and whistles which we attached to our blogs.

It describes an invading

army of snippets from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and Delicious. It may be nice for the article’s author to conveniently track every last mention of his or her article, but for the reader it just means hundreds more comments to not-read.

Lots of comments amounts to an enormous long list of entirely unstructured text. There are no dividers or subheadings, no logical progression of arguments or groupings of opinion and no distinction between unique, intelligent insights and throwaway expressions of approval and opposition. Because nobody can be bothered to read through such a mess before they add their own comment, there isn’t even the structure of a coherent conversation