Bonus: a transcript of Sans Soleil.

In comparison to Mark Bernstein’s Writing the Living Web, Ed’s piece has more tactical advice: matching blog software to your style of writing, picking good titles, writing for an audience that will drop in via search.

But they agree on not getting worried over the size of your audience, and the importance of archives.

Update: Fixing the mix-up on Mark’s name. Sorry Mark, and thanks _m. Weep for us, btw, for we can’t shut down the Red Wings in the closing seconds.

Comment Policy: I’ll use s/[aeiou]+//gi on your comment if warranted.

I heard about Ms. Sierra canceling her ETech presentation when Liz Henry IM’ed me this afternoon, and she wrote a powerful response, along with a challenge for all of us:

I’d like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we’ll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it’s major or if it’s minor, it’s all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, “That’s not funny,” when it’s really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it’s not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.

It’s not new, Anil, it’s just that the cycles are shorter.

If I understand Clarke correctly, his decision wasn’t prompted by a threat against a family pet, but disgust over the mess that comments on political blogs turn into. Not just political blogs. Look at comment threads on YouTube for another example.

Weblog comments, as well as social networking sites, are sensitive to scale. And yes, there’s exceptions to the rule such as Making Light. However, Teresa, Patrick, and Jim put great effort into keeping it from going off-road.

There’s another thing that helps Making Light: shared community. Read the thread on Mike Ford to get a feel for this.

A majority of the readers of Making Light know each other through Science Fiction fandom, we’ll see one another regularly at conventions, and there’s several hundred person-years of shared experience.

Same thing with blogs run by technology veterans. The readers are working on similar problems, with similar tools, serve on committees, and see one another at conferences.

Compare that to a comment thread elsewhere, where there’s nyms, hostility, a strong desire to count coup, or the number of people who’ve ‘friended’ you.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave comments on, but still encourage you to respond in your blogs. There’s aggregators and search engines that’ll point back to what you say.

While providing a purpose-built (ahem, Atom) feed remains the best answer, hAtom offers two things we didn’t have three years ago:

1. A consistent content model: you don’t have to analyze the markup and write a custom XSLT transform (such as in my example using The Nation, or the feed for The Infinite Matrix.)
2. A widely deployed model: It appears that Sandbox, a theme with hAtom support, will become the default template for WordPress.