Are Blogs for Authorship or Exchange?

I was catching up on reading one of my favorite blogs -- Steven Johnson's (at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com ). I came across one entry entitled "Two Things I Would Like," (from August 4, 2005), and I became very disappointed in Johnson. Once I got over the feeling that one of my fave authors had clay feet like the rest of us, I was stimulated to ask some questions about the purpose of blogging.

Before I get into my questions, let me post here the quote from Johnson's blog that got me mad/sad then curious/analytical. Johnson was asking his regular readers to recommend some software that would let him convert his blog entries into files on his hard drive. He wrote:

I'd like the title, date, and primary text included, but have no interest
in all the other info -- categories, comments, trackbacks, etc. (It'd also be
nice to have the title of the document by the title of the blog entry, not some
weird numerical thing).

What really bugged me was that he had "no interest" in saving any of the comments on his blog, just his own words. To me, 50% of the value of a blog is the comments -- the communication and collaboration between author and readers. Without the comments, a blog is just a home page -- a writing space for authorship rather than exchange.

What makes this "genre" (if you will) so innovative is the give and take between author and readers. Blogs exemplify the way that we make meaning: collaboratively. A blogger's entries can seem like a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it; the comments are proof that the tree really fell, and together they make rhetoric -- language in social interaction.

Now, maybe I am just being a little harsh on Johnson. Maybe he dutifully reads all of the comments on his blog and co-constructs meaning with them in that moment of reading. But, if I were to save my blogs as files, I'd want the comments too. Publicly stating that he has no interest in saving them strikes me as hubris. Maybe that is a requisite quality of best-selling authors --- but I wanted to believe that Johnson was more pure than that, more true to the poststructuralist theories he seems to embrace in his books.