As we all know, blogs are a great tool for a brand to communicate with their customers and community. And as we bloggers all know ourselves there is always the balance you need to find when it comes to comments. Do you require an account with your blog? Do you have some captcha on your site, do you do moderation?
Linden Lab now has chosen to lock down commenting to only logged in users. As Robin Linden writes:
This seemingly small but fundamental change will, over time, allow us to greatly expand the convenience and utility of the blog (and in the next phase, the forums).
But is this a small change? If you look at the blog you notice a very reduced number of blog posts but also comments recently. One can say, the communication between Linden Lab and their community is already declining (which is part of the discussion actually going on in the comments). Adding the need for a login will further strengthen this trend. It also means that people who don’t yet have a Second Life account cannot comment at all.
I think in order to keep a conversation going (as you know, „Markets are conversations“) you need to make this happen as easy as possible. This is especially important for brands these days. It might mean you have more maintenance work to do on the comment side but today you just need to have a budget for this.