Legal Marketing & PR

Closed Comments: Don?t Make This Mistake at Your Law Blog

By Amy Derby

Are You Talking To Me or With Me?

My ironic moment of the day: I found the ABA Journal’s article Web 2.0 Still a No-go via Twitter, tweeted by Michael Lubofsky (aka @lawmarketing). I was fascinated by the article and had something to say. And hey, abajournal.com is in blog format, so yay; I was actually going to get to respond with what I thought were some very valid points.

Then I got to the bottom of the post and found this:

“Commenting has expired on this post.”

“How sad,” I thought at first. Then my thought pattern quickly changed to, “How ironic that a blog post talking about lawyers not understanding Web 2.0 has closed off its comments.”

Why in the world would anyone do this?

Blog Posts Don’t Expire

You slap it on the web; it’s there forever. Blogging is a conversation, and hopefully an ongoing one. Blog posts from 2005 still get new readers today, and those readers still have something to say. Is their view less important because they found your post a few years later? I think not.

The ABA post is from September. Clearly folks are still reading it. (At least @lawmarketing and I are!) What are they gaining by closing off comments?

Build Bridges, Not Walls

Closing off comments means you?re having a one-sided conversation. You?re saying ?This is all about me. I don?t care about you.?

Web 2.0 is interaction. Today, next month, presumably twenty years from now.

How do you feel when you land on a blog post, have something to say, but then can’t say it because the blogger has put up a wall where a door should be?

Full post as published by Law Firm Blogger on November 18, 2008 (boomark / email).