To Comment or To Post?

Sometimes you read a blog post and you feel compelled to make a response, either by leaving a quick comment on their site or blogging on the subject yourself. Whilst we make such decisions on the spur-of-the-moment, it is important to choose carefully. A blog is not only a means of publishing your thoughts to the world, it is also an aide-mémoire, and if you only comment on a subject your thoughts may become lost. I have just spent/wasted 30 minutes trying to track down some thoughts I had almost a year ago.

Om Malik had just posted on Joost killing their desktop client, a sensible move that I remembered writing something about a long time ago. Unfortunately searching through my blog posts only revealed a reference to a plugin by Joost be Valk. Had I started to imagine a virtual past? Was I one step away from claiming to work at CERN in the 1980s? Luckily I eventually tracked my thoughts down to a rather rubbish comment on TechCrunch last October.

Yes, in this case, it did turn out that the thoughts weren't really worth remembering, but it would have plagued me for years if I hadn't managed to find them. I will comment more carefully in the future