This passage is from Glenn Greenwald’s column on Salon. I hope that I hold my commentators in as much esteem as Mr. Greenwald. He’s right over and over again. You learn a lot from those who comment. They have thoughts and ideas you hadn’t considered. If this blog gains readership and becomes more and more successful, a great deal of success will be due my critics and commentators.

James Pilant

This is the essay from Glen Greenwald’s column –

This, for me, underscores how truly valuable is a vibrant comment section. The effort to find a compelling title had been a fairly futile one notwithstanding the efforts of multiple people who do this sort of thing professionally. But by expanding the effort to thousands of people, the number of great ideas increased dramatically. That’s a microcosm of how a smart, engaged readership and commentariat can substantially improve the value of what one writes. I’m periodically mocked for my propensity to add multiple updates to my posts, but so often, my doing so is because readers/commenters point out added ideas, evidence, arguments, objections, etc. that I didn’t know or think of and which deserve attention or a response. The ability to interact and engage with readers, rather than speak to them in monologue form, has always been one of the things that has most appealed to me about writing a blog. Several of the posts I’ve written which received the most attention, made the biggest impact, came directly from readers/commenters.

For those reasons, I’m amazed when journalists scorn their comment sections and treat them like a nuisance or worse. The interactive aspect of writing on the Internet — being able immediately to hear from smart, opinionated, engaged readers who often know things that the writer doesn’t know — is one of the forum’s biggest advantages. It provides a crucial check (no factual, logical or grammatical errors remain undetected for very long), and the ability to quickly access the knowledge base of thousands and thousands of people at once is an irreplaceable resource. Of course, commenters (like every group) can sometimes be annoying, and for the thin-skinned, the criticisms to which one is continuously subjected render the entire process undesirable. But as this highly successful search for a creative book title reveals, the benefits so far outweigh the burdens that it’s not even a close call. Smart journalists see their readership as a great resource to be tapped, not as a passive audience to be ignored.