Thomas sent me an interesting article about blog commenting and negativity. It has to do with public blogs, but I am going to do a spin on it for edublogging:

Dealing with Negative Comments on Your Blog

My initial impressions (without reading through the archives of content) are that the focus is on social networks, not individual bloggers. One comment I found annoying is the following:

"Honestly, if you don't have people disagreeing with you once in awhile, I think you have another problem."

The link in this sentence goes on to an article about groupthink. Michelle Martin asserts that one needs to separate those that make good points well, those who lack social skills but have good points to make, and those who are just trolling. I think that for student edubloggers first opening their posts to the public, all comments need to be moderated. Questionable posts need to be sent back to the posters for revisions, for editing, and for a sober, second look. They are blocked till they re-send an appropriate comment suitable for a student's edublog. Trolls can be deleted and blocked. In this case, there should be a discussion among students about a commenting policy among students, and for those participating with students for those posts students decide to make available to the public.

One serious drawback to the Me2U system is that students' comments are write once/read only. This is pretty limiting, and if a student mis-posts a comment in haste, they should have the option to take back those words, revise them, even delete them, and re-post their comments. This option should be left open so the student commenter can edit their comments and delete them if they choose to.

Author's Update: April 2010 - though this post was written more than a year ago and referred to the Me2U community commenting feature, it is an important consideration for the AU Landing community of learners.