Links across weblogs
Writing in Schoolblogs, Will Richardson points out how frustrating the disorganization of a cluster of web logs can be. If weblogs are conversations (and schoolblogs, in which an entire class creates individual web journals as individual projects, are more emphatically a conversation than most) then linking the conversation is important.
Threaded lists like MetaFilter help keep comment from drifting away, but they also promote the all-too-familiar pattern of flaming that destroyed usenet and that, more recently, shut down almost all the major Web design community portals.
It is interesting that Weblogs don't flame -- or rather, their flames are unlike the flames of discussion groups. Even weblogs dedicated to flamage (Winerlog comes to mind) are usually less obnoxiously personal and less intensely trivial than the worst usenet flame wars. It might be interesting to know why this is true, lest we accidentally make things worse with new weblog technologies.