Seth is Smarter than Me

Shocking, I know. It turns out that my snipe at Seth Godin in my previous post for not having comments is not really valid. There might be an actually strategy, not laziness, behind the choice to not have comments. Darren Rowse explains it best in an interview with Guy Kawasaki:

However another stroke of genius (I'm not sure if it's intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it - 'sneezing' his post further than his current readership.

Check out the number of blogs that link to his posts in Technorati. Most of them are just writing things that you'd normally expect to see being left as comments on a blog. It's no wonder that he's currently the 13th most linked to blog in the blogosphere (according to the Top 100 list)!

Darren goes on to say that this "strategy" wouldn't work for everyone, especially new bloggers, unless you have an alternative method for getting traffic to your site such as a successful book or a well known online profile of some kind.

So, I'm eating crow today. Sorry Seth. It still would be interesting to know for sure if this was an intended strategy or if Seth just didn't want to moderate comments.