Freedom of Speech and the Blog....

As I've gotten this whole "blog" thing down and have started visiting more and more blogs out there I've discovered something I find interesting. I like to leave comments, because I personally enjoy it when you guys comment (hint..hint..I know how many of you read this every day - lol). So if someone makes a really good point, or has a very nice blog I feel it's appropriate to say "good point" or "nice blog".

What I have found though is alot of bloggers don't accept comments from anonymous users, and some don't accept comments unless they have been approved. I read one the other day "To prevent malicious comments your comments must be approved by the blog owner". Now this was a small blog and not even that political more personal in nature. I started wondering....wow now who would make malicious comments here?

I can understand this on some of the larger more heavy duty political blogs. I personally have had to delete a few comments during the whole Terri Schiavo case because I do allow anonymous comments and a few people made silly death threats. So, I deleted them. It is my blog and if someone wants to be a royal jerk and cross the lines of normal decency, bye bye they go. That might sound a bit hypocritical given my belief on free speech, but I don't expect people to always agree with me, just to be halfway civil about it. As I say often, if everybody agreed with me it would be a very boring world, unless I could be some type of superpower dictator of the world, then.....that might be tempting....

One of the local city council members has a blog, however he doesn't allow comments at all, he stated it was due to spam issues, and he was working on resolving it but last time I visited there were still no comments. However, he does reply to email so there is a way to contact him if you have a compliment/comment on something he wrote. I admit I was disappointed because when I first heard he had a blog I thought "Wow, he really wants to hear an exchange of ideas about what we think". Granted he's never not responded to an email, but it's not quite the same thing as seeing what other residents of our area are thinking as well.

To me, one of the primary reasons for doing this is to share with you what I think, or what I've found out there on the net that I think is interesting and to hear what you think. I have developed some pretty awesome email friendships from the blog so I get feedback from some that way, especially MFWSHAB, but my feeling is I want to make it as easy on you as possible for you to comment if you want to. While I wouldn't be happy if a whole bunch of you wrote "Lisa you suck" nor am I looking for an ego boost; to me hearing what others think about points made is part of the whole blogging fun. However, if you do comment, I might comment back, years of message board training - lol.

In fact I will relate to you in all honesty when I first started doing this I didn't think hardly anyone was reading this, because I'm such a comment happy person and I had no comments - lol. Then I added the site stat thing and was amazed at how many of you take the time to visit me. Now granted one of the main reasons I do this is for me so if there were only two or three of you out there I'd still write. While I'd love to be as popular as Brew's Robot-Invasion is, I'm happy with my little niche in the Blogosphere. I'm still new at this and to be honest again, I'd be afraid if I got too large I would start focusing on how many of you were here and how to entertain you rather than just being me.

Freedom of speech to me is important, and one of the reasons why the blog has grown because alot of us out there have quite a bit to say about all kinds of topics. I'm starting to learn, anyone can blog but to be a real blogger takes time, and I thank all of you who stop by to see me grow into that real blogger.