Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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"Comment is Free
It's not just a quote, or the motto of the Guardian's influential blog, but it's also an important tenet of journalism. But when Scott wrote those influential words, journalism and publishing was a very different business today. The cost of putting words to paper, and exposing that paper to the world for review was much higher. The internet is changing that every day, While I can report the exact cost of running www.studentnerds.com/blog, I can assure you that it is much much cheaper than an industrial printing press
and national distribution network. Many blogs and website (and hopefully this one) actually make money (how does $40K per month sound?).
The internet hasn't reduced the importance of facts, they are still sacred, maybe even more so. But I do believe that it has increased the value of comment. The world has become a big coffee shop, a university, a newspaper and a library. We are all, or at least should be, both producers and consumers of content, of facts and comment.
The Student Nerds try to add to this debate. We hopefully provide valuable facts about ways to back up PCs and share documents and music. We also try to add (what we consider to be) worthy comment as well. We hope you guys read and enjoy what we write. But more importantly, we hope you guys are inspired to contribute as well.
Part of this goal of this blog is to create a dynamic community, the intellectual equivalent of a game of "First Bounce or Fly" we (only by virtue of being authorized on the blogger account) toss up and idea, review or fact and if we do our jobs right, hopefully someone catches it and runs with it, agreeing, disagreeing, and adding to what we have presented. The comment system that we have added to the blog, IntenseDebate 
is a great tool for tracking and monitoring comments, people can give comments 'thumbs up' or down for comments that they read, receive and send email responses to what others have said, and track members of the community that they find insightful. We hope you all sign up (you can also comment without creating an account of course)
One of the most enjoyable posts that we have made was Praz's Google Docs post, both because it was an excellent post, but also because of the comments that it spawned (16 of them!), starting on the original topic, open source software, but eventually turning to not only Google, but Microsoft, cloud computing and start up DNA. I learned a lot more from the comments than I ever would have if I just wrote about it. There's a new model of journalism, and if Scott was alive today, his quote might look more like this
"facts are sacred…to the extent that they free people to comment"
We hope you guys will feel free.
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Andrew W. Watterson
