Not surprisingly, the seminar was demanding intellectually: after a few days, some of us took to referring to it as “research boot camp.” That’s what it was. We first met the night of July 31, and finished our work August 12–just about two weeks. We had one day off: the middle Sunday. Every few days, new visiting scholars joined us to speak to their expertise: Charles Bazerman gave an overview to situating research in the larger field, and Cheryl Geisler offered a two-day workshop in coding data and discourse analysis. Dartmouth professors John Pfister gave a crash course in statistics, and Jonathan Chipman in visualizing data. John Brereton offered excellent advice about grants. Chris Anson and Les Perelman spoke to assessment and situating research in larger institutional frameworks. The last two scholars to join us, Neal Lerner and Chris Haas, spoke to research design and ethical research. We concluded with two days of presentations in which participants summarized our research design and described what we learned during the seminar, with Haas and Lerner offering commentary. Throughout, all of the visiting scholars were available for office hours and individual consultation–for me, some of the most valuable time I spent at Dartmouth.

The seminar felt like a week, or maybe two weeks, of graduate school every day. Seminar organizer Christiane Donahue planned the calendar very well, keeping us busy but providing time for individual work. Some days, especially early on, consisted of eight hours of intensive seminars. Some were divided between morning seminars followed by individual work, consultations, and group work. None of the activities suffered for want of attendance and participation. Even optional night and weekend classes were very well attended. All of the participants lived in Fahey Hall, a dormitory on campus; classes were held in a common space on the ground floor of the building. It wasn’t hard to find attendees hanging out and working in the common space on the first floor, and it was downright easy to seek help with seminar work: for example, after Geisler concluded her lectures on Friday, I suggested all interested attend a “coding party” on Sunday afternoon. About eight people showed up and worked for two hours, coding each others’ data and reviewing segmenting and coding schemes as well. This good-natured work ethic stuck for the entire seminar. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all work and no play: I definitely enjoyed local beer culture with Scott Whiddon, Molly Oberlin, Justin Lewis, Tara Lockhart, and other attendees. We got to hear Charles Bazerman sing opera during a much-needed first Wednesday social. But it was great to collaborate with a group of people serious about learning and getting things done.

Much of what I learned during the seminar was focused specifically on the transfer research Neil and I are doing. As always, I took notes carefully–55,000 words in seminars, group work, and on my own. I’ve shared my wordcloud. I boiled those notes downs to eight pages of takeaways after the seminar, but can focus on three things here:

First, our research design was too complex. Neil and I wanted to use multiple methods of data collection in order to achieve the complexity we believe is necessary for understanding our research questions about writing in the major–learning about the activity systems in which our participants work. But planning for multiple kinds of data collection is cumbersome. Better to achieve complexity by focusing on case studies driven by interviews–and learning to become a very good interviewer. Here are the changes I proposed in my presentation:

Secondly, I failed to separate assessment and research. Part of the reason for the over-complex research design Neil and I imagined arose from prioritizing institution-focused goals (including all of WIU’s diverse constituencies–transfer students, first-generation college students, etc.) over research goals (gathering a manageable amount of relevant data). Ironically, over-prioritizing WIU needs could mean not meeting them as the study collapsed under its own weight.

Third, I left the seminar with a list of methodological questions to approach as I continue to learn the art and craft of empirical research:

1. What principles can guide our comparisons of information from different sources?
2. How can we measure the quality of our interviews—given the difficulty of research into transfer?
3. How can we be genuinely beneficent to our participants, on the short and long term?
4. What mechanisms can help us apply lessons learned from this study to future work?
5. What support structures and resources will help us move the project forward?

All of the seminar leaders were very helpful, but I want to mention two in particular. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any academic work as hard as Christiane Donahue did for the entire the two-week seminar. It seemed like she was up before everyone every day. Before all else, she created a fantastic intellectual experience for us, providing quite a bit of it personally by speaking to transfer, research design, and other specialities while offering us individual help. In addition, she arranged trips to the local grocery, helped us get access to scholarly resources on campus, and woke up in the middle of the night to help seminar attendees who’d locked themselves out of their rooms. With Kathy Herrington, I was very glad to sneak around Hanover a bit and put together a basket for Tiane which recognized how helpful she was for all seminar attendees. Secondly, Chris Haas: her talk on research ethics came at the end of the seminar when many of us were borderline exhausted. But it was invigorating, and thought provoking too. I went straight from her first talk to a chair and wrote Neil immediately to say, “Hey, we’ve got to think about this.” The two three page handouts she provided were very dense, giving me two or three specific things to think about. After I returned to Macomb, I wrote Haas with some follow-up questions, and she traded email with me, providing some very helpful suggestions and things to read–and strong encouragement as well. Much appreciated.

Quite a nice exclamation point to my year of retooling. A wise choice for all of the audiences I noted above: people like me looking for a mid-career change, early career scholars with projects develop, or graduate students looking to establish a firm grounding in research methods. I’m looking forward to following this year’s Dartmouth Seminar, and getting together with my cohort at CCCC in St Louis.

When asked how long they spend reviewing job applications, 55% of hiring managers (n=2654, ±2% MoE) said less than two minutes:

Respondents who self-identified as HR managers (n=218, ±6.5% MoE) were even more speedy. Almost half less spend less than minute, and a quarter between one and two, meaning 72% of HR managers take less than two minutes for initial screening:

So job applications (résumés + other documents) are likely to get more than 30 seconds of attention–but not much more. (Thanks to Ryan Hunt at CareerBuilder for sharing these data.)

Since I’m teaching technical communication this semester and next, reading job applications is on my mind in other ways. Like quite a few textbooks, our program’s book starts out by using job application materials to model core concepts (Anderson, Tech Comm 7/e, centered around usability and persuasiveness). The syllabus framework my colleagues and I share begins with this assignment. So I read quite a few job applications this semester, though I certainly spent more than two minutes on each one. (Sometimes a lot more.) As in previous semesters, I had a pretty high drop rate the first four weeks, and some palpable dissatisfaction among students who didn’t drop the course. Quite a few students submitted draft job materials which would fail the two-minute test. There were three classes of problems:

1. Some students simply underestimated the amount of work needed to do work which meets my standards for quality, or tried to get by with generic materials not really tailored to a job description. (Of course, this can happen in any class, on any assignment.)
2. For many students, education is what happens the classroom, and work experience is limited to service work. This leaves them very little to insert into customary résumé categories other than “Education,” and very little to say about experience and abilities in cover letters.
3. They struggled to understand the job ads. Becoming fluent in disciplinary genres requires extensive knowledge of content, and too many students are simply unable to productively read job descriptions in their fields. Both lack of experience and lack of content knowledge play a part.

I’ve talked about the connections of genre and disciplinary knowledge in class. To see struggling students learning this lesson on the fly isn’t pretty: for example, having no way to write cover letters besides copying examples from the textbook nearly word for word, changing a few nouns here and there to keywords drawn from their field. For seniors, this is a bitter pill to swallow. And it should be for us: in these too-blank pages, we can see that students have realized that substituting academic faux-languages like “research paper” or “English essay” won’t replace the languages of magazine design, or sustainable energy, or broadcasting, to name a few of the majors I’m working with. On the one hand, this is good news: students know they need to learn more. But on the other hand, it points out our classroom practice is still problematic. When will we make the same realizations our students have? It’s downright unpleasant to see seniors struggle to connect what they have learned in their four (or five) years at the university with the languages and forms of their fields. It’s painful for them, and it should be painful for us.

With this in mind, I am eager to continue moving away from these mutt genres and finding ways to help students connect the work we can do with real genres to their classroom experiences. That’s no sure fix, but it’s a step forward. For sophomores and juniors, at least, there are possibilities. Reading collections of job advertisements can be used to map futures: the language of job advertisements we read together, now nearly foreign to students, suggests their do-lists for the next few years. I’ve asked students to speak with their advisors and professors to identify activities, internships, and other things outside the classroom which will help them learn the way their disciplines work. I’ve explained the connections between learning content, genres, and the languages of professions. This has been confusing and challenging for students, and often works better one-on-one than in class. Regardless, I want to continue thinking about ways to seeing fewer blank pages from students about to leave the university, and I hope my work with transfer and writing in the major will help.

Secure wireless redirect

Good; that tells me what to do. Not as good: when I followed the directions, downloading a Java applet, checking the publisher, etc., then entering my username and password, a second error was raised (link through for text):

Timeout or wrong password?

I’ve been using the secure wireless (and recommending it to students) for about a year. Perhaps that’s why, even though I got this “failure” message, I connected just fine. In any case, the error message is problematic–is the problem a wrong password or a network timeout? Software shouldn’t ask users to distinguish these very different problems–especially when, by policy, we’re locked out after five failed logins. Better to say what’s wrong and allow us to correct the typo or report the network issue.

Finally, here’s some wording which could be a little better:

Authentication server error

“The credentials you provided cannot be determined to be authentic.” Hrm. This is from the new authentication server–again, a welcome change from the days of expired and/or self-signed certificates. We should drop the Official Style here: “Wrong username or password. Please try again” seems a reasonable substitution.

Thanks to the WIU technology people for the security push.

Right away, I’m wondering about notology: how much time we’ll devote to what not to do. There are lovely visualizations out there, but a lot of noise competing with the signal. Too many “infographics” would be better rendered as simple text with an occasional chart or graphic, rather than a gigantic graphic. Here’s an example, “Securing yourself from a world of hackers,” 1000 pixels wide and 3172 pixels tall. Another, “Profile of Mac vs PC,” is 947 × 3693. Both graphics approach interesting subject matter: password security is particularly welcome, and the Mac vs PC comparisons are funny. But execution is poor. Form seems the starting point, not content. (“Infographics are hot hot hot. Go get me one.”) Worse, I see plenty of of questionable how-tos high in Google search results. Again, I welcome suggestions for high quality sites.

I’m considering opening week work which features a few graphics, discusses their high and low points, and makes clear that visualization is not just prettying up (poor quality) content. Tying these activities to course objectives would set a clear path for the semester. For example, content in this password security graphic is weak:

• The headline “Securing yourself from a world of hackers” is alarmist and misleading. Any security professional will say “securing yourself” is impossible. Reducing risk? That’s possible. Unfortunately, bad content carries through to “How to create the perfect password”–no. There can be no perfect password; no security mechanism is perfect. The copy promises something which can’t be delivered. From a security firm, this is disappointing.
• The method for password generation and memorization is questionable. Try the mnemonic recommended here: it’s cumbersome at best. They generate ?LACpAs56IKMs” with five steps. Who can remember this? How is it more secure than other common methods of creating pseudo-complex passwords? If, as they recommend, it’s okay to write down passwords, why not just use randomly generated character strings? And it’s incomplete: they recommend testing passwords, but don’t say how.
• The authors call on a few sources (Schneier) but cite irregularly, truncating citations to base URLs or not including them at all. The graphic mentions NASA guidelines but there’s no mention of NASA in the sources. Not a good example for academic writing!
• Writing style is wordy and inconsistent. Some bullets use second person; some use third person. (“It is okay to write passwords down so they can be remembered” not “You can write down your passwords” or “Writing down your passwords is okay.”). Copy needs revision to bring characters and actions forward.

Etc. This maps to an objective about enhancing high-quality content through careful representation of data. Similar critiques could be targeted at others: effective design, knowing common visualization approaches, and familiarity with common visualization tools. (I guess it’s time to build out those objectives, eh?)

What “good” graphics should I include? Tufte’s well-known favorite, Minard’s rendering of Napoleon’s march? Staying meta, David McCandless’s What Makes Good Information Design? would be a good pick. I like both, but I think I also need some tables. Sometimes, tables are just better. A course in visualization which taught students how to make accessible, effective, well-designed tables would provide a very useful and transferable skill.

In October 2010, not long after I committed to retooling, I approached Neil to see if he wanted to collaborate to study transfer, since I knew from our research group he had experience with qualitative research. Like me, he was interested in the transfer research of Elizabeth Wardle and other scholars, and agreed that our writing program needed to better understand transfer student needs and other changes reverberating from WIU’s adoption of the “2+2″ model. I outlined the work I imagined doing to Neil, shared the Dartmouth Seminar application, and suggested we apply for a University Research Council (URC) grant as well. This is WIU’s featured internal grant, up to $5,000 “intended to promote research or its scholarly equivalent in appropriate fields by providing ‘seed’ money for the initiation of new projects.” We began meeting regularly in November, sharing readings in writing transfer, methodology, and working on the grant application as a way to begin designing a study. As Neil and I talked, we realized our long term research interests shared a key commonality:

• I was refocusing on ease, the array of specific practices which favor simplicity and transparency over complexity and difficulty, and discovering strong correspondences between qualities discouraged by ease yet conducive to transfer.
• Neil had long studied the negotiation of writerly identity which occurs when writers learn the particular worldviews, genres, and tools associated with the communities in which they seek membership. Imagined as conflict, this negotiation could hinder transfer.

That is, we realized both ease and negotiation might operate as barriers to transfer, and we could shape our study around this concept and the institutional needs we agreed were most pressing. Thinking big, and with some previous studies we liked in mind, we begin imagining a multi-year project which sought to collect data from multiple sources, answering the oft-discussed difficulties of studying transfer: surveys, interviews with faculty and students, and case studies which included analysis of student writing. Piloting the research would begin in 2011-12, most of the work would take place in 2012-15. We named the project “Transfer @ Transfer,” since our target is writing transfer in the upper division, and it’s a given at Western that includes many transfer students. By December 15, we had our application to the Dartmouth Seminar ready to go, and we were thrilled to see our acceptance in early January. At the time, these were our research questions:

1. What successes and failures do students have as they move from writing in general education courses to writing in their majors?
2. What strategies do students use to transfer writing skills and knowledge from writing in general education to writing in the major? Baird: how do students negotiate rhetorical and ideological conflicts between two or more activity systems? Dilger: does ease (making easy as a strategy for mitigating complexity and difficulty) play a role?
3. What differences in transfer of writing skills and knowledge, if any, exist between students who satisfy writing requirements at two-year and for-profit colleges, and those who do so at WIU?

In January, Neil and I began writing the URC grant. We began to articulate our research design more explicitly: we sought to collect data which would allow us to understand the activity systems involved in transfer. For this reason, we imagined a three-stage research design: surveys designed to generate preliminary data and help us recruit students and faculty for more in-depth interviews and case studies. We planned to interview faculty and students at WIU and area community colleges which send large numbers of transfer students to WIU, followed by case studies of students at WIU and perhaps community colleges as well. Given the many different student and faculty demographics in which we were interested, we thought a fairly large number of participants would be required to be able to effectively answer questions raised by our institutional exigences. Faculty interviews would allow us to understand how transfer was (or was not) discussed in the classroom, and would help us understand better understand students’ experiences. We assumed, based on the literature, that talking with faculty would be needed to help us understand what students could or could not transfer–to get access to students’ thought processes, and to help us learn more about things students might not even be conscious of. With methods on our minds, Neil and I proposed a roundtable on transfer research methodology for the Midwest Writing Centers Association conference, October in Madison.

In March, the online component of the Dartmouth seminar began–email, telephone consultations, and group video chats with Dartmouth facilitators and other participants. These conversations helped Neil and I begin to see the limits, or rather the over-extensions, of our research design: the amount of work we imagined was just too large. (After one email exchange with Charles Bazerman, I checked a spreadsheet I had built to project our workload, and discovered an error which underestimated some required time by a factor of 5. Doh!) So we began to scale back the size of our study while keeping our diverse data collection methods. That is, we still felt that our research required a rich set of data to work with in order for us to understand the activity systems in which our writers moved, and to gain access to the discursive processes involved in transfer. We believed workload could be addressed by reducing the number of participants in each leg of the study, and finding ways to be more efficient (including more than one student from the instructors in the study). By the time we submitted the URC grant in April, we had made changes which reflected this thinking, and we submitted a research design to our IRB as well.

Three items of good news came in May when we found out our proposal for MWCA was accepted, we were awarded the URC grant, and our IRB protocol was approved. At this time, we were still planning to use surveys for the first stage of the study, with the hopes of targeting summer courses, but it soon became clear that wouldn’t work, since there were so few writing in the disciplines courses being taught. We also had trouble scheduling interviews: there just weren’t that many people around WIU or our local community colleges. My travel schedule didn’t make things any easier. We did get to interview four WIU faculty, and those interviews gave us a lot to think about. But we didn’t get as much work done as we planned.

When I traveled to Hanover for the Dartmouth seminar, I had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Anson and Neal Lerner, describe our intentions in detail, and get feedback about our plans. Independently, both Anson and Lerner suggested further changes would be wise. They agreed that Neil and I needed to find ways to get at information which would not necessarily be articulated by students. But they suggested that we didn’t need to work both sides of the problem–community college and writing in the major–to fully understand it. And, again independently, they suggested a different approach: rather than multiple kinds of data collection, turning to stimulated recall or techniques like those used by Flower and Hayes. Over the next few days of the seminar, I realized we might drop everything but the case studies, reconceptualizing those around interviews, and reintroducing other types of data collection if needed. Rather than spending a lot of effort to develop and execute surveys, interviews, and other instruments, then building an analytical framework to bring their data together, we should focus on interviews with a small number of students, and broaden data gathering only if it became necessary. I wrote up my ideas and shared them with Neil, and we quickly came to consensus about a new design.

That brings us to the current time. Neil and I recruited participants by visiting writing in the disciplines classes in August and September, building a pool which satisfied us in terms of demographic and curricular diversity. We made contact with ten students and interviewed them all once, with very interesting preliminary results. We’ve continued refining our design and our goals, and submitted a proposal for the CCCC Research Initiative. Over the next year, we’ll interview our participants four or five more times, collect their writing, discuss it in depth, talk to their instructors, and learn how writing transfer happens for them. As we move forward, I hope to keep up with our study here. Reconstructing what we did from email, meeting notes, and other archives is possible, but it would be far better to have a more formal record.

So I took a deep breath, decided it was time to retool, and pushed the pause button. Instead of writing more essays which were primarily theoretical and historical, I would read broadly in method and do my best to add empirical research methods to my toolbox. I began that work by reading some qualitative research textbooks recommended by Jameison. I also returned to texts I had read and taken notes on over the years, asking, what’s going on here method-wise? I also started imagining how I might investigate long-standing questions about ease not only by going to the archive, but through other means.

In late December 2010, I found out my proposal for ATTW 2011 was accepted. The following excerpts from reviewers’ comments were telling:

• “It is not clear from the proposal if the author is drawing on original studies that reveal ‘new patterns of use’ and that go on to demonstrate/recommend new usability evaluation techniques?”
• “The nature of the study that would be presented in the session is not clear based on this abstract.”
• “Arguably, this presentation does seem to be somewhat speculative but if the author has solid supporting data then I can see it being a solid contribution to the program.”

Each reviewer referred to empirical research in some way. Each one asked, Where is your data? And I realized the question I’d asked myself not long after Jamieson’s visit was right: Where is my ability to produce reliable data? 

Once I committed to retooling, I applied to the Dartmouth Seminar for Composition Research, and I asked my colleague Neil Baird to help me to develop an empirical research project focusing on writing transfer, writing in the major, and transfer students. I posted the tag cloud I made from Dartmouth notes here, and I’ll soon follow up with a longer post. And I hope to begin writing more about the collaborative work Neil and I have been doing, as a way of taking up some of Christina Haas’s suggestions for being a more effective empirical researcher.

So no, I don’t have a list of articles I sent out to share–better, I have a new way of doing business that has changed the way I approach research, assessment, and other spheres of my academic work.

Here’s what my co-presenters and I offered:

• Steve introduced the panel, explained how we came up with the idea, and noted that we organized it using Google Docs and social media, not blogging.
• I said blogging isn’t dead, but commenting is. I identified two reasons: the chilling effects of trolling, and the fracturing of communities caused by social media.
• Virginia pointed out that Web 2.0 reified the idea of blogs. Great point; blogging may be dead in that it is ubiquitous (at least in style). We need to recall ntions of blogging which see it as thinking out loud together. She plugged Academia.edu.
• Carrie noted that academic blogs might be dead; a lot of bloggers who focus on other spheres are going strong. When we ask students to blog, exigence is often muted or lost, and blogging becomes just another form of boring academic writing. But we can encourage students to find exigence through their own spaces, like her students’ blogs, Pint-Size Pixels and The Indie Kind.
• Liz offered this superb couplet: “Blogging is dead, as dead is it could be / it killed the hipsters, and now it’s killing me.” She noted that after blogging every day for five years, her blog is now cryogenically frozen. Her most popular posts were on disturbing topics, raising questions about readers. I really liked this analogy: blogging is dead in the same way Latin is–we identify it as virtuous and see strong benefits for other forms of writing from it. But it doesn’t connect directly with our vernacular discourses.
• Brian suggested we see blogs as flow-based media (e.g. Ridolfo’s rhetorical velocity), tracing vectors of literate practices through them, rather than seeing them as finished products. These media are sedimentary: they can be stirred up periodically, only to settle down, and they accrete over time.
• Andre: if blogging is dead, why does Nielsen Media identify 76,000 new blogs in the past 24 hours? This raises questions about commercialization: are these real blogs or simply ways to repackage content (for example, everyone on Fox News has their own “blog”).
• Brendan identified blogging as “other,” invoking the idea of the “Buribunk” which records everything about everyone’s life. Some of that life-streaming has moved to social media, which is fine. So what’s left? Reportage made blogs famous. Maybe that’s where it needs to stay.

Here are some of the conversation threads. See also the #cwcon #e13 Storify page Dennis Jerz generously made for our session:

• We didn’t define “blogging” or “dead,” and I think we did a good job working that back into the discussion productively. For example, Bob Whipple asked if Blackboard “blogs” are really blogs. I think most of us agreed they aren’t.
• Many of the panelists discussed ways social media are competing with blogs. But blogging is a genre, and many social media are platforms–they work only in specific ways, and their content is wedded to specific forms. So the content on blogs is much more portable. Dennis Jerz pointed out the move from blogs to social media is often from open systems to closed commercial products.
• Troy Hicks turned the discussion to RSS, which has a big role in blogging, since it’s the primary engine for notifications and blog-to-blog and blog-to-other-media remediation. Several people pointed out that Dave Winer’s “Scripting News” remains a very popular blog; its content drives that. I noted that Facebook takes a one-way approach to RSS; feeds used to be available but aren’t any longer. Brian noted that while Twitter still offers RSS, they’ve changed their API to reduce the capacity for getting data out of Twitter. (Awesome tweet from Mark Crane: “Facebook is the Roach Motel of RSS.”)
• The search capacity of Facebook and Twitter isn’t very good, and their interfaces focus on the present moment. Combined with social media’s limitations on RSS, and the stabilizing influence of the permalink, this makes them far less permanent than blogs. Is this a feature or a bug? Carrie and several other people weren’t sure they wanted tweets to be permanent. Matt Burton pointed us to Storify, which can suck in social media and facilitates adding commentary. A bunch of people immediately began playing with it. (Including me.)
• Carl Whithaus gave us a great sound bite: “Not only is blogging dead, Twitter is too. And Storify is the zombie life of both.”
• Maybe we should have subtitled the panel: Yes, No, Zombie!
• Should we really care if blogging is dead? If the writing on blogs is transient, it would be fine for a blog to live and die, having served its purpose. As Harriet from B/StM said, “You guys are talking about bloggings as if it was a marriage!” Maybe we should be looking at the number of people who’ve tried blogging, not those who still are.

Feedback, corrections, additions welcome, though I don’t expect to edit this so much as help Dennis’s Storify effort. And please point out if I’ve misrepresented anything; things moved fast, and I was moving between three conversations much of the time–and loving it. After the session, I said to anyone who would listen, “I hope I never give a long talk again.” Please, let’s see more conferences in the field follow those who’ve realized the value of short talks and conversation.

My thanks to Steve Krause for pulling it together, and all the presenters and audience members for making this the most enjoyable conference presentation I’ve ever been a part of.

Jeff and I are quite honored to count From A to <A> among the previous award winners. We are also grateful to the University of Minnesota Press for a smooth publication process.

And here’s another shout-out to our contributors. The strength of the book is theirs. Thanks again, folks.

My bit is: blog commenting is in a bad way because of trolling (for large blogs) and social media’s tendency to fracture communities (for small ones). Here’s the whole thing, which I want to cut down a little to ensure it fits in the three minute window I’ll have to speak.

When weblogs first emerged, both collections of original writing and aggregation-model blogs like Slashdot, I remember thinking blogs were going to revolutionize online discussions. Sophisticated moderation and rating systems would prevent the legendary problems of Usenet newsgroups. Comments would be, to borrow Slashdot’s moderation categories, funny, insightful, interesting, and informative, with off-topic, troll, flamebait, and redundant discourse pushed aside.

Of course, this didn’t happen. Blogging was able, in large part, to overcome spamming. But blog commenting leaves much to be desired. Sure, there are some pockets of success. Relatively small weblogs, like many of those in our field–Alex Reid’s, or Steve’s, or Brendan’s–still have success with comments. Brendan, for example, often has authors commenting on book reviews he writes. But overall, blog commenting is in a bad way. Does that mean it’s dead? And if it’s the interactivity of comments that makes blogs different from plain old web sites, then what? If the interactivity is gone, is a blog a blog?

I see two things hurting blog comments, for two different kinds of blogs:

For big blogs, trolling lowers the quality of discourse and discourages participation. I’m talking not only about trolling proper–4chan-style stirring the pot for laughs at someone else’s expense–but posts which are made with little regard for any politeness or community. Aggressive, hastily written, disrespectful, whatever. A visit to any large blog, or site which has adopted the comment-after-story style of blogging will show this: Huffington Post, ESPN.com, or scores of newspaper sites. Moderation can tame trolling, but the investment required is considerable. And many blogs and sites which seek to emulate blog style have simply shut down commenting in response. Frankly, I’m not sure what alternative they have.

For small blogs, aggregation by other media has affected public spaces on blogs. Back when I used to write on my weblog more than once a month, I enjoyed robust discussions regularly. But these discussions fractured when I started replicating my posts on Facebook as notes. I’ve watched many blogs make the same transition. Similarly, for Twitter users, retweets or directed messages can replace trackbacks or comments, splitting up what used to be one community. Yes, in some cases, the frequency and depth of discussions increases when blogs are aggregated in other places. But at the least, the gated-community effect of Facebook and Twitter moves some discourse from blogs to parent sites. There’s room for more research here: how are these services affecting blogs “native” comment and trackback interfaces? This would be interesting to consider for large sites, too.

I’ve talked about blogs big and small, which implies, of course, that there’s a middle space where commenting can thrive. And perhaps services like Disqus or Facebook Connect will end up finding it. Blogging is still a young medium, and the social media interacting with it are even younger. So perhaps five years from now things will be very different.