Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog
1 December 2025
Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website:
The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.
Presumably, if someone writes a comment, that is actually a post on their blog, in reply to something I’ve written here, I’m notified in some way. Further, I can then allow that comment/blog post to appear as a comment on my website, if I so decide. But there’s nothing new about writing responses to another person’s blog post, on your own blog.
Once upon a time, the only way to “comment” publicly on someone else’s blog post, or rather, an online journal entry, as they were once called, was to write a post on your website in response. This is because early blogs didn’t have commenting facilities. Back then, the tool closest to permitting any sort of on-site public interaction between website writers and visitors, were guestbooks.
But guestbooks — intended really only to allow visitors to leave brief, and usually complimentary messages — were hardly an appropriate forum for discussing blog posts, particularly if these conversations were in-depth and involved numerous participants. But unless a visitor told the writer about their post-in-response, just about the only way a writer might find out was through their referrer logs.
But writing blog posts as comments is a practice that has somewhat been revived by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community. A blogger might respond to this post, on their website, using the title “Re: Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog”. They might also send a pingback, a webmention, or an email, advising me of their blog post.
Being able to reply to blog posts with comments though made for a convenient way to host a centralised discussion about an article, rather than having fragments of it scattered across the web. Centralisation can have some benefits. Readers no longer needed a website to respond to a blog post, and often only had to supply an email address, whether real or not, to air their thoughts.
And so the discussion flowed.
But we all know what happened next. Free-for-all commenting was a boon for spammers. Winer’s blog discourse system would create a hurdle for spammers, who likely would not have a website they could post comments to. Of course, serious comment spammers could setup a blog to publish their spam to, but perhaps the discourse system will have a way for dealing with that.
The blog discourse system also addresses another matter few people give much thought to: comment, and by definition content, ownership. Who “owns” a comment I leave on someone else’s blog? Me, or the website owner? If I append my name, I am identified as the writer — am I not? — and intellectual rights and what not, are mine, even though the publication is not.
Most likely that is the case. Perhaps though, somehow, someone with the same name as me, might claim the comment as theirs, particularly if they see some value in it. I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens, if at all, probably never, or incredibly rarely. But if my comments in reply to other people’s posts are published at my website, and then “syndicated” as an approved comment, the possibility of ownership conflict is removed.
What I wonder about though, is where do the comments I write, which are a response to a post on another person’s blog, end up on my website? Will these be funnelled into a separate content stream? I’m not sure I like the idea of comments intended for other blogs, featuring on the main feed of my blog, amongst my regular posts, even if I did compose the comments.
And will differing content management systems be able to talk each other? For instance will a comment-post made on a WordPress blog, post seamlessly onto, say, a Ghost blog? What of bona fide commenters who do not have blogs? Questions remain to be answered then. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about Winer’s discourse system, and seeing it in action.
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