A popular debate around the blogsphere has always been if blogs should have comments or not. Today, Marc Andreessen adds to that debate by removing comments from his blog. Personally I have always believed that without comments, in general, a blog loses out since so much discussion happens in the comment section. But some of my favorite bloggers like Amit Varma, Seth Godin, and now Marc don’t have comments on their blogs and they don’t lose out and here are the reasons why it works for them.

• Noise. Most blogs do not generate the number of comments that those blogs are likely to do. In the case of TechCrunch and Scobleizer, the comments sections can become painful to read with the name calling, semi-spam and occasional childishness.
• Nature of posts. I read Marc and Seth’s blogs to get a sense of their insights into certain subjects. There is no need for discussion right there, at least not most of the time. Use trackbacks, one can follow the conversations across the web.

Which brings us to Trackbacks. Right now, Technorati provides a mechanism to track blogs linking back to you, but the manner in which the data are presented and how it can be used is severely limiting. If we want to make the web a conversation, then fixing trackbacks should be one of the first things we look at.