
Shawn Blanc is a full-time intercessory missionary, on top of being a husband, blogger, musician, and a host of other talents. He runs two blogs: The Fight Spot and ShawnBlanc.net.
Shawn has been very successful on building a community of readers on The Fight Spot, so it came as a surprise to me when he launched another blog (ShawnBlanc.net) with comments disabled. Shawn was gracious enough to be interviewed by me and to answer some of my questions about community and disabling comments.
Listed below are ten brief questions regarding community and comments on blogs.
1. Ronald Huereca: You have a very active community on your website The Fight Spot. What is the difference in a community formed around The Fight Spot when compared to your other site ShawnBlanc.net?
Shawn Blanc: For sure the obvious difference is the comments. TFS (The Fight Spot) has comments enabled, while shawnblanc.net does not. Those are two very purposeful decisions I’ve made as to how I view the two sites.
I think of The Fight Spot like a Bible study small group. It’s a safe place for folks to ask questions and state their opinions and give feedback. Sometimes someone just wants to say “thanks for that article”, while other times I’ll get really deep and thought out questions. I’ve set myself up as the Bible Study Leader, and so most of the community reads The Fight Spot to get teachings, encouragement and pastoring.
On the other hand, the community around Shawnblanc.net is quite different indeed. For one, it is a completely different demographic of readers — consisting primarily of Mac savvy web and design geeks. Since comments are not a feature of the site, all the feedback I get comes through direct email or trackbacks.
I think the best way to describe the community around Shawnblanc.net is a bunch of peers hanging out giving each-other high-fives. But really, this describes the vast majority of the Mac Savvy design community in general. My site is just one more URL that has come to the party … so to say.
Ultimately, your site will attract like minded folks. The Fight Spot has a strong community of Christians going after God, and Shawnblanc.net has a strong community of geeks who like gadgets. For me, instead of developing one blog that blended the two (which is what I tried to do for a while on TFS) it is easier and more fun to have two sites devoted to each.
One more thing I’ll add, it was a whole lot easier to build the readership base on Shawnblanc.net than it was on TFS. What took me 18 months on TFS has taken me 7 weeks on shawnblanc.net. Read more…