Come to think of it, in many ways I think blog comments contribute to a
great degree to the value of the post itself. Even if some or even most of
the discussion happens off-site.

Food for thought…

That said, I recognize I owe my career to the things I've written and
created online. In that sense, yes, I can't divorce myself from the
awareness that what's posted online can have significant work/financial
impact.

Still, I'm not convinced that a blog without comments is still a blog. The
posts might be widely read or narrowly focused or serve some other very
specific purpose very well, but without conversation, it's not a blog.

I suppose what I mean is that I think a blog, in a very contemporary way, is
very specifically a website that has (loosely defined) frequently posted new
content and houses (at least the potential for) conversation. This is very
consciously contrasted with “old” media that simply provided fodder for
thought or for discussions elsewhere, letters to the editor notwithstanding.

On closing comments after a certain period of time, I have no opinion.
Closing comments doesn't negate blogness; having comments open for any
significant time ensures blogness.

(I love that we disagree on this. It's like a crazy thing!)

“Blog”is defined as a web page that is updated, as opposed to a static page, which is not. Period. Blogs are used for many reasons, not all of them as yours is– for commercial purposes. You have to be available to your customers. People who blog for themselves or a small number of people have other reasons and being available may not be one of them. I have three blogs. One has comments, two don't. One is for my students, one is connected to a huge forum (people are encouraged to come in and post), and the last is where I write about my life, post photos. It is a diary. People who want can e-mail me about content. My friends do. I am not interested in random people coming across it and telling me what they think, as they did with a previous blog. Random people translate into possible sales for you, so you need comments, you need to build community and have people keep coming back.

It is the function of the blog that determines the use of comments and nothing else. A blog in itself is a webpage that is upated.

I think the Internet is amazing in its capacity to grow organically and have these sorts of definitions and labels and websites flow and mutate and evolve. They're all blogs, 'sfar as I'm concerned.

Put another way: If a blog has comments but no one leaves any, is it truly a blog? (blog:tree::internet:woods) (OK, I am kinda in love with what I just did there.)

I guess my point is that I'm not totally comfortable with the idea of making conversation the defining mark of a blog. When conversation happens, it's fantastic. When a post generates a reaction, it's great. I think the point of a good blog is to forge connections between writers and readers, and I'm not entirely convinced that one needs comments in order to achieve that. (Though it helps, most definitely.)

And I also think that disabling comments after 10 days is completely reasonable in terms of how fast news gets old on the Internet.

It seems like there is also a difference between someone writing on non-personal topics (ideas about business or politics) and someone just chronicling their daily life. While the former can be the writer/journalist category, a lot of the latter are just public diaries that have attracted an audience. If you are a diarist, you may also be a writer but you may not depending on your devotion to the craft of writing and editing which can be hard to judge from the outside. I'm not sure I'd call someone a writer if all they do is type out a story from their day in the exact way they'd describe it over the phone to her friends and can only maybe bother to run spellcheck before hitting publish. My feeling is that if the diarist blogger publishes things to be seen by a wider audience that would be same as a story I write in an email and email to friends, she's not a writer as much as one who correspond via a computer media. Would a person's twitter musing make him a writer? Yes, if it's done with creative or intellectual intent. No, if it's just him just complaining like the rest of us about the price of milk. It's hard to know where the term writer ends if the world is also living (and writing) online.