In the olden days of blogging, before there were comments, if someone blogged about something and you wanted to reply publicly, your option was to post something on your own blog.
All of us early bloggers had blogs, so, you know, that made some sense.
Eventually bloggers wanted to be able to have people comment on their posts, so blogging software added the ability to leave a comment. A grand idea! Collect all the comments in one place, attached to the blog post, and you can easily see the discussion. Heck, people could even leave a comment and link back to their own blog with an expanded post on the subject. This was before the days of link spamming and even rel=”nofollow” nonsense.
So as you see in the screenshot of the comment form, it wants your Name and your Email address. This is all good, accountability, identity, etc. There’s also a field for “Website” which made sense, right? All of us early bloggers had blogs.
I think many of us believed that some day everyone would have their own web site.
Having your own web site isn’t the equivalent of owning your own home. I think that used to be part of the “American Dream” if you ever bought into that sort of thing…
People are fine being sharecroppers, and if they want a “home” on the web, huge corporations like Twitter or Facebook are happy to rent them some space. If your landlords are cool, then it should all work out, but if things turn sour, well… Let’s just say it’s nice to have a place to call home.
