That's more or less my view. I think if I had a blog that was part of some community, like a blog discussing issues of interest to Americans in Copenhagen or so

That's more or less my view. I think if I had a blog that was part of some community, like a blog discussing issues of interest to Americans in Copenhagen or something similar, I might have comments. But for my personal site, which is a mixture of essays, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, research write-ups, etc., I'm not sure I want to support the ability of random passerby to append text to the end of the page. Maybe that means it's not a blog, which is also ok (I don't actually use the word "blog" anywhere on it). I do like thoughtful feedback, and I also think additional information contributed by third parties can sometimes be useful to append to the end of an essay, if it has clarifications/corrections/etc. So my half-way approach has been to explicitly note at the bottom of each page that comments are welcome by email, and then, if I do receive useful emails, I'll update with the newly received information. For example, the bottom of http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html has short pointers to two things sent in by readers, which they presumably would have left as a comment, if I had comments.