Something that continues to amaze me is the fact that while the whole point of blogging is to share and communicate your thoughts and experiences to the wider world out there, the interactivity built into blogging software and formats is shockingly limited. If I wanted to communicate in a static way I'd put up a web-page not a blog. I put up blogs because I want them to become seeds for discussion points - to get other people involved and to get involved in return. But the only mechanism for discourse provided on most blogs is a space to comment. All very well, but once someone has commented, how can I, as the author or even participant, explore or take that thread of thought to its conclusion if I can't respond specifically to that comment? Writing another comment on the blog is not the same thing. They need to be linked.
And that in a nutshell is why most people just lurk and never bother to comment, and why I believe that while blogs sometimes make interesting reading, as a community tool they are dead in the water until their structure changes to become more like discussion threads. I can't see any reason for why blog softwares don't do this as standard, other than its just the way they originally started in the primitive days of when web logs were simply online diaries - and that basic and static format has since become the norm.
The funny thing is that I see blogs as clearly the logical next step in online discussion, but while forums and discussion threads seem to be dying out or surviving firmly in computer geek world, few sites out there seem to be making the simple connection and evolving blogging software to enable this extension. This blog format of course is a perfect point in case. Go ahead and comment. You know I can't really reply and we can't really discuss this further. Not that satisfying is it??