I don’t know when it happened, since I hadn’t checked in for almost a year, but McSweeneys’ Internet Tendency finally added RSS feeds for new posts.
It’s great, and a good percentage of what scrolls past me in Snackr is now McSweeney’s-derived.
This is a really great (albeit strangely late) step for McSweeney’s, but their reluctance to embrace the full blog form (meaning adding comments, as their posts are still more or less arranged reverse-chronologically) is a real disappointment.
Imagine if the next time I read the funniest thing ever, saw my good friend published, or noticed one of my favorite authors stopping by the site if I could have a direct conversation with them.
Seriously. This is a big deal. The reason I don’t buy issues of McSweeney’s Quarterly or The Believer much anymore has a lot to do with my blog reading and my direct connection to the authors who write them.
They’re passing up a really huge possibility here, and I hope they’ll make the addition of comments soon for the sake of the readers and, well, the SAKE OF HUMANITY.
6 responses so far ↓
1 cdever // Jun 10, 2008 at 9:58 pm
But McSweeney’s isn’t a blog. If they opened themselves up for comments it would turn the place into something akin to a bad creative writing workshop.
Does everything have to be a conversation. Just enjoy the thing.
2 Bryan Woods // Jun 11, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Why would it be a bad creative writing workshop for readers to be able to directly communicate with their authors? McSweeney’s only publishes the very best flash humor pieces on the internet, and I can’t imagine a whole lot in the way of “Oh you should have used a semicolon.” If they were to allow a conversation to take place and it turned to shit is one thing, but to intentionally disallow conversation out of fear of reader behavior is absurd. They’re on the cutting edge of publishing, after all.
3 Bryan Woods // Jun 11, 2008 at 12:42 pm
And real quick - Having daily updates that display in reverse-chronological order, with permalinks and RSS feeds, etc… McSweeney’s is now officially a blog with comments disabled. That’s what I think is really unfortunate.
4 whitneymcn // Jun 11, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Bryan -
First a side note: I realize that it doesn’t directly address what you want from McSweeney’s, but pretty much every piece published on McSweeney’s has the author’s email address at the top, so readers do have the ability to communicate with the authors; by providing those email addresses McSweeney’s is certainly facilitating that sort of communication and feedback.
Whether readers should be able to communicate with the authors (and each other) in public, on the site itself, feels to me like an entirely different question.
I don’t have any idea what their reasons for the lack of comments are, but for one example I’d totally accept something like “we want the focus of the site to be individuals’ personal experience of the pieces that we publish rather than community interaction centered on the pieces we publish.” Seems like to me like that would be a totally valid aesthetic decision.
While I couldn’t deny that mcsweeneys.net is now formally more similar to most blogs than it used to be, I have a harder time accepting that that means that the site *should* adopt all of the conventions of a blog.
I definitely agree that it would be interesting to see what the comments on McSweeney’s would be like, but I can live without comments. As you say, they’re on the cutting edge of publishing: I’d rather have the McSweeney’s folks moving slowly and thinking about how to best implement their own ideas and goals online, rather than doing something simply because it’s “what’s done” online.
5 Bryan Woods // Jun 11, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Hm. I hadn’t thought of the email link or why I’ve never emailed any of the authors. I’d imagine it’s the same reason that I’ve never called Robert Scoble when he posts his phone number or even why I’ve never emailed you after you leave a really amusing tweet. Comments are a really great and strangely informal kind of direct communication. What it would do to McSweeney’s I’m not sure. Frankly, I could see it going either way. But I must admit that I tremble with delight when I think of someone like David Foster Wallace posting a blog — Allowing me to see what he’s thinking about every day and to add his thoughts and feelings to my daily routine. And, well, to let him know how I feel about it myself.
6 monikamagdalena // Jun 12, 2008 at 12:26 pm
turning it into an official “blog” would make it seem less glamourous.
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