Comments considered harmful

Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer think you shouldn't accept comments on your blog, and I agree with them. I haven't had a blog popular enough for this to be a problem, but I just set one up that's likely to get more traffic. We restricted comment posting to author-only, and renamed "Comments" to "Follow-ups". So the idea is that people respond by email, and the author digests the feedback and uses Blogger's commenting mechanism to post his own follow-ups. Seth Godin does something similar: no comments, only email and trackbacks. Follow-ups happen in new posts. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.