"Mistakes are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

Last night I discovered to my chagrin that in my post on December 13th about the blogs I read frequently, I mistakenly called Jay Rosen, the author of PressThink, Jason Rosen. I have now edited the post so that his name appears as it should, thereby sweeping my error under the rug, so to speak, but the experience helped me discover a way to fix a problem this blog has had for some time now. I discovered the faux pas when I accidentally clicked on the "comments" link at the bottom of the December 13th post rather than the one at the end of yesterday's post. There I found a message from Mr. Rosen himself in which he told me about the error (you can see his comment and my subsequent ones by clicking on the "comments" link at the bottom of "My Blog Reading List").

I hadn't seen Jay's comment previously because for some time now the "comments" facility has been failing to display the number of comments (as it is supposed to do) after an entry. I didn't know why, and up until today, I hadn't bothered to troubleshoot the issue. This morning, I spent a little time at YACCS (Yet another Comment Control System) and resolved the issue. Now when you post a comment, the number at the end of the comment will be incremented so that it will show that someone has responded to my post. I am hopeful that this will enable me to see it when you reply to something I have posted here so that I and others will be able to respond to it. It is a well-known principle of operant conditioning that behavior that isn't reinforced eventually dies out. So when people comment and get no feedback on their comment, they eventually quit commenting.

I am hopeful that by resolving this issue this blog can become more of a two-way conversation. So even though I am embarrassed that I made the mistake on Jay Rosen's name, I'm pleased that it led me to fix something that has been broken for a while now.
- posted by Perry @ 8:24 AM