When I was writing my post on Can RSS Subscribers help you make money online, I came across an interesting discussion about shared Google Readers and the issue of whether or not comments should be allowed on these, because they will be away from the blog or site they originated from. I’m not going to discuss this now (perhaps later…), but there are some very good links you can start with if you want to check out the debate any further: The Race to Kill Blogging and an older post from TechCrunch Google May Add Comment Feature on Google Reader Feeds

What the discussion made me think about, was the nature of blog comments and whether they are of benefit to someone who wants to make money from their blog, anyone who wants to gain credibility from their blog, or anyone else who simply likes putting their opinion across in a social blog.

Living in Europe, I live in a different time frame from many other bloggers, which can make me a little ‘out of sync’ with blog comments. I can make a comment, but not see it appear until hours later, as the blog author was asleep when I wrote it and is unable to approve (or unapprove) it. My copies of blogs I am subscribed to by email often arrive in my email box while I am asleep, so by the time I go to the other blog to comment, most things have been said (but sometimes I just have to comment anyhow…)

Likewise, when I make a blog post, with a trackback to another blog, it can be many hours before the other blog owner picks it up and, if the post I have made needs answering to ‘put things straight’, then this can leave things hanging for some time when they really need to be said.

Blogging across the internet, to make money or just to share your thoughts to the world, can make the issue of ‘time frames’ a problem, but when it is your blog, at least it gives you time to take stock and control your comments. And it is this matter which I am finally getting around to on this entry!

A blog owner has control of their comments. They decide which comments are shown and which are trashed. They decide whether or not the comment owner’s link is allowed in their signature. They themselves are given time to come up with their answer to the comments. And they can choose to close the comments at any time. Being able to do all these things gives the blog owner complete control of the conversation (I’m omitting to mention scraping here, but that’s a whole different issue).

But once the conversation is taken off the blog in question the owner loses that control. Likewise, in making making comments on other people’s blogs, you lose control of what you have said as this can be interpreted any way the blog owner chooses to do so, including turning the comments off.

Is this a good thing? Well, that is debatable. I’ll give you an example of a subject which is getting rather worn here, but is still quite relevant.

A few weeks ago, Bryan Clark sold One Man’s Goal to a young man called Marc Galeazzi for (what was reported as) ten thousand five hundred dollars. Marc admitted he knew very little about blogging, but was very keen to learn. The result? Bryan was roundly castigated in many places online, the most vociferous attack coming from Victor Franqui, who had earlier given his readers details on how One Mans Goal was failing in December of last year.

Personally, I feel that all the pros and cons of the sale of One Mans Goal will never be revealed. Too much water has gone under the bridge between the sale and now, to prove in any satisfactory way whether Marc got a good deal or not. In that time, those both for and against the transaction and Bryan himself have had time to amass ‘facts and figures’ to answer their particular case.

But what is interesting is that, until recently, only a limited number of ‘facts’ had been revealed. Bryan had come across to Vic’s blog, but had provided no further real data. He had then published a ‘Straight from the Hip‘ article on OMG, saying “it takes a REAL writer to go over the facts and decide for themselves, whether or not what they are reading is true”, but the ‘facts’ he published were still somewhat limited and they left the door wide open to more accusations.

And then Bryan Clark got on with his ’site flipping’ and Marc took over OMG (with, it has to be said, support from Bryan Clark).

But nothing was resolved, including Bryan’s credibility. As he no longer controlled OMG, he could hardly post any more information there about the transaction and, in any case, I reckon as far as he was concerned, why should he? To go over this would not be the way forward for OMG which now had to make its way on the net as a blog with a new owner who needed to establish his ownership and his ‘brand’.

As to Marc Galeazzi, he gained a lot of support because of the negative comments about the sale of OMG. New readers signed up for his RSS feed and commented on his posts. We wanted him to succeed in the light of adversity. But it soon became apparant to most of us that Marc was struggling big time. We offered our comments and some offered to help Marc out directly, but mostly we got silence in return, hardly any comments and a dwindling number of posts.

Then a blog called The Piss Biscuit published an entry called One Mans Goal to One Mans Hope, calling again for Marc to get his act together. Telling him he had a load of support and imploring him to please interact with his readers before it was all too late.

Bryan Clark replied in a way I felt belittled the situation. I hate to see people scammed, even if some would say “they should have known better”. I had followed the OMG sale (and the previous sale). Even before I knew of the existence of Victor Franqui, I had still felt that OMG was not the site to learn anything about making money online, rather the opposite in fact. And I thought that the sale of OMG to someone who may well have ‘an entrepreneurial spirit’, but who knew very little about blogging and the whole make money online blogging world. was not something which could be thrown away as ‘maybe he should have bought a scooter instead’ (said by PB, not Bryan Clark). So I went in there, rather explosively it has to be said, closely followed by Griz, who is much better than me at putting ‘facts and figures’ across.

To cut a long story short (and I could be wrong here as I cannot be all over the net at once), for what could be the first time, when pressed, Bryan Clark gave a much fuller version of what had occured between him and Marc.

Now, whatever I think of the merits of selling a failing Make Money Online blog to someone who has very little knowledge of blogs, leave alone the MMO niche, at least Bryan Clark gave us what many had been wanting to hear and he did that in the comments on the Piss Biscuit site.

Should he have had to do this? Probably not. In the grand scheme of things, we should not have to answer every accusation thrown at us online (and how can we really answer our accusers anyhow when nearly everything online can be faked?). But in this case it was required, not only because Bryan Clark wants to be known as someone who is ’straight up’ when it comes to the truth, but also so that everyone can take what they will from the results and move on.

Had the blog owner of The Piss Biscuit decided to turn off the comments on his blog before the questions and answers had been made, we all would have been left in the dark about many apsects of the sale of OMG. Now we at least have both sides of the story.

When we are trying to make money on the net, we need as many facts as we can get, or we will continue to make the wrong decisions and spend money we can ill afford. Admittedly, we will never get all the ‘facts’ and we have to remain critical of everyone just to try to make sense of the host of different ‘reasons’ they give that something is ‘going to make us money online’. But if having to scour the comments of a blog (and get people to say even a little more about a matter which concerns us) is the way to get more information, then so be it.

As a last remark. I just hope that, after all the extra attention, Marc Galeazzi gets his act together and really tries to make money online, whether on OMG, or on one of his other new sites. He’s got so many people backing him now, all he has to do is take the right advice…

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