Today we had to implement comment registration on Searchblog, and across all the sites hosted by my fearless Webmaster Scot Hacker. He explains the reasoning here, I commented at the end of his post on my thoughts. In short, comment spam is borking his servers, and because Searchblog is such a target, this site is unfortunately responsible for much of it . I am saddened that this friction has to be thrown into the conversation, I much prefer the ability for anyone to read these posts and comment at will, without first having to register. I particularly appreciate those of you who post anonymously, I know many of you work at companies that I cover here, and often you make your thoughts known under cover. Do not worry, you can keep doing that, but you have to register under a pseudonym. I very much hope this will not stunt the conversation I have grown to count on to keep me on my toes, please let me know how you think it’s going. jbat at battellemedia dot com, if you can’t stand to register and comment!