VC Fred Wilson frets that Techmeme is a conversation that’s one sided because it doesn’t treat comments as highly as blog posts.  He is unhappy that Scoble’s post decrying Silicon Valley VC disease got onto to Techmeme but David Hornik’s reply did not.

Even if Hornik’s reply was as good or better than Scoble’s post (it wasn’t), I have a couple of problems with this.  First, its a reply.  Whatever interest or excitement it has fundamentally comes from responding to the blog post in the first place.  Techmeme and others are justified in focusing on the start of the conversation.  The blog post stands without the comments, but 90% of the comments cannot stand on their own without the blog post. 

Second, the purpose of Techmeme et al is to identify interesting conversations, not to microanalyze them down to which comment was the best.  What possible basis can they have for determining which comment is best at present anyway?  Are we going to measure impressions?  Do we care that the comments at top will automatically get more impressions than the ones at the bottom?  Are we going to vote?  At Helpstream, we let people indicate which response to a community question is the “best answer”, but no such facility exists in the blog comments I’m familiar with.

Fred’s been at this business of comments being more important or as important as the blog post for a while.  I read the comments.  There are often good ones.  Most of the time they are not as good as the blog post itself though, and this is not unexpected.