Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Comments are Off on Rosie’s Blog

Comments are Off on Rosie’s Blog

Entertainer (gee, is that how she’d describe herself? I just don’t know, having never been a big Rosie follower) Rosie O’Donnell has been blogging, and talked about her decision to turn comments off in a recent Broadway World article:

Comments though are something that was causing trouble on her blog, and they’re now off. “We took comments off because it was getting to be ridiculous. I get great responses, but then you know it just takes one idiot, writing ‘you’re fat, you’re a dyke, you’re a fat dyke, you’re gay, and you’re fat and you’re gay, and you’re also a dyke’ and it gets out of control. There were no limits on how much they could post, so they could just post pages of that, or put links up to porno sites or whatever. Finally, we just decided to make it comment free.”

From remarks earlier in the story it sounds like she began the blog for friends and family, and was perhaps taken off-guard by the responses of people that don’t fit into those categories. Her experience with comments makes me think that personal blogs may be one more of those “normal people” things that celebrities can’t have—like a walk in the park. It’s hard to think of any big celebrities that are trying to keep personal blogs that aren’t also tied into their professional identities. There’s Wil Wheaton, of course, who does an interesting job of straddling the fence, but arguably is well-known but not huge. Nor, incidentally, does his existence push quite so many societal hot buttons.

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 03/29 at 01:51 PM • Blogs