Jason Shellen is the Associate Program manager at Blogger. He's keynoting on Where Blogs Matter. He makes the point that most blogs have an intended audience. What people write is meant to be read and blog writers get to know their audience. That's really true. I have a whole new group of people I know because I write a blog.

Jason talks about some of the things that create community and points to comments as one. I've never enabled comments on my site for a couple of reasons. First, that makes it seem less like my site where I say what I want and more like a bulletin board. Second, I'd rather people who want to comment take the time to write out their thoughts on their own site---I think it encourages more thoughtful response.

Jason says that Google is using a blog called "Google Love Notes" for support to publish notes that they get that the rest of the company should read or see. This is a cool idea. A blog makes this so easy and letting everyone else know the issues that support is seeing through real email messages is a good way to do it.