Despite being 10 days old (a lifetime in the blogosphere), I felt obligated to take an alternate position to Joel Spolsky & Dave Winer on the topic of blog comments. Here's Dave:

"...to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.... The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.... That's what's important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment."

And Joel backing it up:

The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don't have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else's thoughts. That's not freedom of expression, that's an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they'll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you'll move up in PageRank, and you'll have influence and your ideas will have power.

When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

Let me go in a completely opposite direction... If you're unhappy with the comments on your blog, you haven't been building your community in the right way. It's easy to blame comments and anonymity and the ignorant masses who read your site and want to interact, but it's tough to put the blame where it belongs - with the blog or community owner.

I understand and can empathize with the frustration you might get reading comments on other blogs, but the value they bring to the table is massive - from both a community-building and a self-improvement perspective. For example, here at SEOmoz, we take incredible pride in the folks who leave comments here on the blog. I would argue that there are hundreds of examples of commenters providing an enormous amount of additional value to the blog posts. This is often true at sites like Matt Cutts' blog, Techcrunch, Creating Passionate Users and, one of Joel's favorite sites, Reddit (though it's not technically a blog).

Let me just show off a couple great, recent comments:

• Beren on using the Google AdSense system for DMCA violations
• Hamlet Batista on identifying directory value
• And this guy occasionally leaves some valuable comments, too

Joel followed up later that day with this post. A quick excerpt:

Clay: “...the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’”...

This is an example of people posting their replies on their own site. There is a lot more value to them than the comments about this post on my own discussion forum. Why? Because I know who Clay is, I've met him, he wrote A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which, to this date, is the most important, insightful, and brilliant understanding of group dynamics in online communities. Dave has something to add to the conversation; some thoughts he's had since the article I quoted him on. Great content, in their own spaces.

This is what I hear coming from Joel:

• Blogs are not neccessarily about comments
• Comments are generally useless and distract from the quality of a blog's content
• Commenters are people afraid to show their identity who are prone to anti-social behavior
• My own community of commenters is not nearly as valuable to me as other bloggers who link to me
• I'd much rather earn the link love from others discussing my posts on their sites than allow them access to do it here (Joel sounds almost like an SEO )

I'm simplifying a bit, but I still struggle to grasp where Joel's coming from. I suspect that this is because he and I have had such different experiences with blogs and blog comments. When I read a blog post, I look through the comments because I want to see how the community of readers has reacted. When there's demonstrably false information in a (popular) blog post, commenters tend to reveal the falsehood. They're great debunkers and skeptics and they also tend to provide good follow-ups, links and discussion.

I'll concede that this isn't always the case. Some blog comments are useless junk. But, guess what - that's how the Internet works! Many times, whether it's search results or Wikipedia entries or forums or yes, even blog comments, you'll have to wade through the noise to find the signal. However, I don't think that's unique to the online world - we dig through the same amount of useless junk in the offline world - people who never matured after high school, junk food, bad quality used cars, noisy apartments, lousy newspaper article writers, bad TV, crumby radio stations, and the list goes on...

So, how do you go about encouraging a great community of commenters?

• Reward them - use rankings or thumbs or ratings or even just friendly replies to let them know you're reading and appreciating
• Recognize them - if someone is a frequent commenter, refer to their previous work, maybe even mention them in the blog and definitely send them an email or drop a comment on their site
• Prune - don't let your comments turn into a trash pile; I'm all for freedom of speech, but at a professional blog like SEOmoz, we cut out the truly junky stuff most of the time
• Make it a Challenge - One of Dave's points that I really do agree with is that you should make it a little harder to leave a comment so that only those who are truly committed will bother. At SEOmoz, we've created a user account system, other blogs use CAPTCHAs or filters to assist.
• Engage in Your Own Comments - Lead by example; comment and respond to your commenters with positive comments of your own that help re-inforce the kind of community you want to build.

All that said, I'm a huge fan of both Dave & Joel - in fact, I've had blog envy of Mr. Spolsky, specifically, for at least the last 3 years. I feel almost guilty that the first blog post I dedicated to him was on a disagreement - perhaps that illustrates another piece of the nature of the blogosphere. We denizens of the web only come out when truly riled and miffed :)