So, I noticed some blogs that show up on read.write.as feed that don’t provide any way for readers to contact the author. By that I mean, not even providing an email address for the author to be reached at.
Previously, I would just write a post as a comment and add a link to the post I’m commenting on. My comment post would then show up on the read.write.as feed, hoping the author would see it. Now, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t be doing that in the first place? Maybe the reason the authors didn’t add contact info is because they don’t want to get comments on their posts? And maybe that includes not wanting other bloggers to write a post as comment to their posts?
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I’m curious to hear other people’s thoughts on it.
It’s nice when people leave contact info, but I never use it to contact someone. I used to have a “Thanx!” contact info page on my blog, but I am changing the layout of it, haven’t done much to it, yet. I see where you’re coming from though, don’t want replies to be public as I used to reply to Thanx messages on the public blog and then realized I was basically violating the confidentiality of Thanx. So I stopped doing that.
Great question — there are a lot of ways to take this. Blogs on Write.as come as unlisted by default. Nobody else can see the blog unless they link it out to the public. So when someone makes their blog Public, she’s doing so for many reasons — one of those is having other people read and respond to her writing on Read Write.as. Now this is of course an implicit assumption, but I think it’s a fair one to make.
What makes things a little more complicated is that there isn’t a baked in comment system at the moment (ie: Remark.as), which means that some people will have a contact page or other means of “comments” while others won’t. I don’t think that omission means they don’t want responses. It could be that they haven’t set up static pages yet or found a commenting alternative.
I personally enjoy your anonymous post responses @dino — it’s a lightweight way to respond to someone work and allows others to not only read your response but read the original post, which gives some benefit to the original writer (even if they don’t see your comment).
You bring up a good point @cjeller1592. If they are publishing to the read.write.as feed, then it stands to reason that they want other people to read their work. At which point, it would be unavoidable for someone else on the internet to comment on their post.
I’m really looking forward to the release of Remark.as. For now, I’ll keep doing the anonymous post response
