Something that bums me out about blogging (and makes it easy to blow off) is the lack of real conversations.  On Usenet, you can pick a group like rec.games.bridge and find a bunch of conversations (threads) going on.  Any decent newsreader will show each thread in a tree form, so you can see who’s responding to whom, and follow the conversation logically.  You can jump in and respond at any point, and when you come back later, your own posts and any responses to them will be threaded right along with the rest.  If you’re using a good newsreader, you can even have it display direct responses to you at the top, and then other responses in threads you’ve posted in below that, and so on, so you can see the stuff you’re interested in first.  Web forums have some of these features, though I haven’t seen one yet that has all of them. Read more »