consequently.org/news

But Greg, you know my email address; you’ve already emailed me once today.

There is no plan to keep logicandlanguage.net anonymous though, it is just that I am still setting the site up (it is not quite 24 hours old) and I will be putting my contact details up post haste…

logican , March 7, 2005 04:40 PM

I think perhaps the best implementation of comments on weblogs is the one at livejournal.com - anyone may comment, but those individuals are known to the system, and typically are part of the community in that they usually have their own blogs there. The commenting relationship feels more symmetrical that way, rather than an unknown group of semi-anonymous individuals submitting comments.

I haven’t enabled comments on my blog, but I do sometimes wish there was a way to allow a sense of community such as livejournal provides.

James Ballantine , March 7, 2005 06:47 PM

On Comment 1: I think there’s a moral to be made here about the intensionality of knowledge attributions… I’ve figured out the identity of the author (and a little bit of nslookup internet snoopery confirmed it), though I will let the author reveal the author’s self in the author’s good time.

On Comment 2: I agree, the community thing is the platonic ideal for these comment systems. I’ve been pretty uniformly happy with comments and commenters on my site (evil comment spam very much aside), partly because I know at least two thirds of them. That’s the advantage of being a second-rate low-profile ‘blogger.’

Greg Restall , March 7, 2005 07:16 PM

I see that my own weblog is inspiring congeners with similar names and similar areas of interest. Good!

PS: Please, do not miss our Counterfactual week and its newer and latest posts.

Tony Marmo , March 9, 2005 03:52 AM

Comment spam is a constant scourge. MT Blacklist does an excellent job for me but I still have to tell it frequently to ‘do my bidding’ as new accounts and spam topics pop up almost daily.

I don’t particularly like the idea of a white list - which Live Journal uses - as James mentions above. This might be just right for ‘inward looking’ community based personal publishing sites like Live Journals but for ‘outward looking’ sites like ours I tend to think this can discourage new participants.

I think your system is a good compromise - Type Key provides a self-subscribing white list and presumably you vet other comments. This might be the optimal solution.

The most annoying thing, though, about enabling comments is that certain people tend to make a real pest of themselves by wading into the comments with off-topic, rambling, disconnected comments that are aimed only at self-promotion and inflammation and serve ultimately only to demonstrate … well, I think we know.

The particularly aggravating facet of such activity is that weblog authors and their regular commenters feel initially compelled to take these comments at face value and attempt to instruct and bring the discussion back to the topic - only to discover that beating one’s head against a brick wall is notably more fulfilling.

M@ , March 9, 2005 01:13 PM

Well, I am sorry if Mat sees me this way. I have already sent many e-mails asking the language log editor to delete my comments at the referred page. By the way, as of last year for me they could deleted everything written there that was signed by me. The editor, however, insists in keeping things there against my will.

I like to debate, but I have refrained myself from debating everywhere in the net.

About my comments sometimes seeming disconnected it is something that has been said about Chomsky’s texts too. Not everything you read you promptly understand. And it is not because you do not understand it that it is something disconnected. It just means that either it is badly written or that you are not used to the kind of textual structure used there.

I just ask you to respect me in the same manner I respect you. You would not like if someone accused you of such things just because he does not understand you, or because you sometimes do not write easy going texts like Agatha Christie.

Tony Marmo , March 10, 2005 05:59 AM

I like to read and to write in Consequently, Semantics etc and Desert Landscape because I can learn a lot from what the authors of these blogs write, and I comment on what they write because I think its wothy to debate with brilliant people like Greg Restall, Kai von Fintel and Uriah Kriegel among others.

But there are other blogs in the internet that are not worthy at all, and these normally belong to bloggers who are unable to debate with others and hate others who amend their mistakes. For instance, among those bloggers are some who come with old misconceptions and prejudices long defused by modern linguistics, such as the myth that some human languages are primitive and lack capacity to express certain concepts, or that there are politically incorrect pronouns (like the pronoun I considered egotistic in the old URSS), or that it is possible to coerce speakers to adopt grammatical rules consciously all the time, etc. I have tried to explain to them that such myths no longer are acceptable as scientific hypotheses, but I have found out that those guys do not want to learn anything from modern Linguistics. My conclusion is that I have only wasted my time.

Tony Marmo , March 10, 2005 09:04 AM

PS:

Close Range, Coreline, Orange Philosophy, Fake Barn Country and Mumblings of a Platonist together with all the other sites I list under the labels Important links and Interesting Blogs and Groups in my blog are also interesting places I recommend, and it is worthy to read and to comment on what one finds there. I cannot say the same about all sites in the internet.

Tony Marmo , March 11, 2005 12:44 AM

Thanks for the warning about comment spam; I’ve installed the Blacklist plugin and renamed my comments cgi file - hopefully I did in time before the little blighters discovered me. Spambots! (if you’re listening) Bring it on!

Gillian Russell , March 19, 2005 10:55 AM

PS2:

To those who have been eager to understand my opinions in non-linguistic issues, I have dedicate a second blog, Maieutikos, where I explain my philosophical position on capital punishment, although I do not expect everyone to be able to grasp or appreciate it in its entirety.

Tony Marmo , March 19, 2005 11:00 AM