Jackie Danicki

Dennis Howlett thinks I (financing my blog with my own cash and time) am like David Milliband (financing our blog with our cash and our time) because I have comments on this blog disabled by default while David Milliband simply cherry picks the complimentary comments to publish and blocks the inconvenient ones.

No, I don’t get it either.

Have a look at my sidebar, where there are ten blogs listed. I contribute to them (plus, as it happens, a few more) with varying degrees of regularity. Here’s the comments situation for each.

My photoblogs have comments enabled.

I have comments enabled on the beauty blog, where I share policing duties with a co-editor, and which is on a system that makes IP-banning spammers easier and less of a time suck.

I have comments enabled on the Engagement Alliance blog, which I paid a significant sum of money to a techie to set up on a platform that makes comments policing much easier and less time-consuming for me. (I finance the EA out of my own pocket and on my own time.)

Another Food Blog has comments enabled and is run by someone else, who has the time and resources to supplement killer comment moderation software with human back-up.

I also blog at Blowing Smoke, which has comments enabled; I share policing duties with a co-editor, and am paid to do so.

Samizdata, where I occasionally post, has comments enabled, with its own technology and editors to police comments.

I very rarely post at tBBC’s blog, but they have comments enabled with both robust comments policing technology and human back-up.

The VNU blog I’m running has comments enabled.

The Exbrayat blog that Antoine and I run together for his family has comments enabled.

My hosting company buggered up the back-end of Gastroblog, hence its dormancy, but that had comments enabled until the spam started killing them.

I have comments disabled on this blog because I choose not to spend my time moderating idiots, which - in my past experience of having a personal blog with comments enabled - is who tended to take up the bulk of my time. You may think that you are entitled to a platform on my personal property, but that is not the case. Where comments are enabled, it is an act of hospitality and constitutes a significant investment of my time; I owe no one either of those, since…again…I’m paying for all of this with my own cash, effort, and blink-and-it’s-gone life.

You are, as always, free to comment on my posts…on your own private property.

Back to Milliband. My point, as some have missed it spectacularly, is this: He should not pat himself on the back for his openness and communication with taxpayers when he is actively censoring taxpayers’ valid questions at the same time.

Filed under: Life