Re: 4 On a search page twitter itself does now have a show conversation link to show how they are related. Here’s a picture of one. This conversation could and did go on for quite a long time. The thing is Dave didn’t start a conversation on Twitter so there really is no thread for it. A couple more conversations he had on the topic are here. Twitter may not be the solution but it has elements of the solution.

5. Generally yes but one thing Dave didn’t really play to is that some posts get thousands of comments and the noise can be overwhelming. I started looking into solutions to blog comments and found http://aboutecho.com/ But if you look at someone using it (Leo Laporte) look – this post has 1543 “comments”.

So I don’t know there are complexities here deeper than are apparent at first sight. I think too the ideal solution depends on your blog/followers/your tolerance for pain/your subject. I want my journals peer reviewed but most my blog posts don’t need to be. I can manage all my commenters easily. Words that come to mind which could be elements of the solution are threads, forums, crowdsourcing, ranking, weighting. Maybe Dave’s blog is at a point where he could get some people to moderate for him. Some of his ideas are great and could spawn whole programs – maybe a forum could handle that coordination better. I feel bad he has to waste his time moderating a bunch of off-topic unhappy irrelevant posts. I mean some of the posts especially if they’re long I have a habit of glossing over myself. I’m going to research this a little more and see if I can’t find some tools/methodology that could help.

1. Agreed. I recently got back from nearly a week of traveling, and missed a lot of news during that period (I was lucky to happen to hear about the Intel-McAfee deal). I wouldn’t want to miss the ability to react to something because I was on a really long bike ride.

2. This is my major problem with Winer’s proposal. My interpretation of Winer’s preferred reaction is for everyone to write their own blog posts in response, like you did and like I did. But it’s difficult to find all of the blog posts that touch upon a particular topic (yours is the third one that I found on Winer’s post, and I don’t know if I’ll find many more), and it’s hard to have a discussion in a bunch of silos.

3. Having the perfect comment is akin to having the perfect blog post – and if you’re going to wait until it’s perfect, you might as well just publish a book.

4. Frankly, I’m not that hot on Twitter as a conversational medium either. You say later in your post that Twitter is effective “with good tools” – perhaps you can put enough lipstick on that pig, but if you need “good tools” to get Twitter to work, then Twitter isn’t suitable for that purpose. Also regarding comment length, it’s interesting to note that there are services like Kapost which do the very thing that Winer abhors – namely, allow you to write a long, detailed comment that could be promoted by the blog owner into a post on the blog itself.

5. See my comments on point 2. While a conversation at point B is a valid way to react to something at point A, isn’t there a greater benefit (and a greater chance of results) if the conversation occurs at point A itself?