How many times have I tried to comment on a blog this week, and been unable to? When I wasn’t looking, the major bloggeries seem to have decided to limit participation only to people who can be vouched for, in writing, by Civil War veterans.
Livejournal? Don’t even get me started. I actually have an account with them, and it still took me twelve tries and changing my password to post a two-sentence comment. That’s not mentioning the three captchas and the paragraph I had to copy and paste into a box.
Blogger won’t let me post unless I sign in to some other account. Am I going to go dig the booklet of d**n useless passwords out of its drawer, search through it and re-sign into google, wordpress, etc — which I am already automatically signed into on the same computer at the same time — to post a ‘nice post’ comment?
I’m told that my own WordPress blog has become just as big a nuisance to post on, even though I only authorized it to present a captcha.
Professional weblogs don’t bother with this cr*p. If I want to post one of the thousand comments on a Chronicle of Higher Ed blog, do I have to jump through hoops? No. But if I want to post the sole comment on some lonely author’s blog, I practically have to drive to Silicon valley and present it to the blog platform’s HQ written on vellum, in my own blood.
Do we blog in order to have conversations, or not? And if so, would somebody tell Livejournal, Blogger, and WordPress?
