I get many questions about my blog. Besides the standard “Why do you do it?” and “How do you have time to do it?”, the most common question I receive is very much in line with the following question that I got last week:
Mr. Neal,
We recently implemented a “President’s Page” on our Village Website. This
allows our Village President the opportunity to regularly comment on a topic
that our Village Board is taking action on or considering. The Village
President wanted this to be set up in a blog format so that our community
members could contribute their opinions on the topic back. I was looking at
your blog and see that a person could read each of your blog topics but I
also see that the comments on the archived articles are turned off. Do you
accept the blog feedback personally to your email or do you actually have
the blogs posted for the general public to read, so they can review each
others opinions? From the note above this form, I believe you are receiving
these personally and they are not publicly posted. Did your municipality
implement any policies regarding the website or the blog format? If so
could I receive a copy? I’m hoping to gather information from other
communities that offer blogs regarding their policies and set to that we can
provide our community with the best forum possible. By default I have
somewhat become our IT person, website co-developer and find that blogging
formats are a new topic. I appreciate your time and patience of reading
this. I would appreciate a response though I understand that your schedule
may not allow that. I am willing to wait. Sincerely with
gratitude….
I do accept questions and comments about my blog. I answer all of them Well, all of them except for the very strange or obscene. Fortunately, I don’t get many of those.
I do not have the blog set up to have the questions and comments posted for all to see. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, I read a few blogs that operate like this. I know how long it takes to do my blog. I can’t imagine how much time it would consume from my life to run a blog where I am responding to a comment based on someone’s comment who was responding to my public reply to someone’s question. Get the picture? I enjoy doing the blog, but I don’t have time in my life to manage what would amount to a public message board/discussion arena on municipal government. Don’t get me wrong, that would be fun, but I’d never get my day job done.
Another reason I do not allow openly posted comments on my blog is that I view my blog as a means to communicate to people, not necessarily with people. There are lots of other communications tools, formats and venues in which I communicate with people. The blog is a great a forum for me to come up with a message and communicate that message the way I want to at the time I want to. In my opinion, there isn’t much effective dialog going on in the electronic world – yet. Blogs and email are not great environments for effective dialog. For me, effective dialog occurs in person….at least for the foreseeable future.
