** My Intellectual Flakes **

I agree that deep conversation might happen on blogosphere. But the pattern of the conversation tends to be individual-centered. That is to say, the blogger as the central node of interaction. However, I really doubt the effectiveness of blogs as many-to-many discussion tool.

The dialog on blog space is enabled by commenting. The problem with commenting is that it tend to be the conversation between individual commenter and the blogger. It will be hard for commenter A to talk to commentor B. In addition, commenting tends to be one-shot affair. Often people just leave comments and never bother or don’t remember to check back. Thus it will be rare to see the sort of back and forth in the dynamic interaction. Another potential problem with commenting is the duplicates. For example, if I read an interesting blog which already has 100 comments. I might not have to go through all the comments or question, but just jump to post my comments or question which might already been raised and addressed.

The social interaction enabled by blogs are highly asymmetrical. If we draw an analogy between discussion forum and a meeting where every participants have equal opportunity to expression their opinion; then blogs are like press conference. The opinion exchanged are centered on the topic initiated by the chair and all the questions/comments are addressed to him/her.