It's no secret I have never liked comments the way they work today. I leave them on simply beacause having them the way they are is still better than not having them at all (but sometime I'm strongly tempted to shut them down).

Kevin Marks on Many-to-Many writes about comments:

If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

During our trip to Vienna for BlogTalk, Matt came out with a perfect metaphor:

Imagine that you really don't like me. One evening you get mad at me and drive over to my house where you daub the message "Matt Mower is a total asshole" in bright yellow paint on my walls for everyone to see.
...
Note that you haven't daubed your own walls with your message of hate. I think it would be very different if that was what you had to do. I think the inevitable consequence of that would be that you would have to learn to be more moderate or people would stop coming by.

The good news is that Technorati is working for us :-).

Delicious Library is a very cool personal library management application. It does everything a nice little database should do. Plus everything a cool modern internet aware application should do. Plus the little trick of allowing you to use your iSight to read barcodes to keep your library up to date. Thanks to Euan for the link :-)