A blog I read 65% for the posts, 45% for the comments 

Jeff Jarvis's blog, BuzzMachine, draws the most fascinating comment threads. Check this one out, on the Cleveland Plain Dealer's blog tempest. (The newspaper hired four bloggers to be opinionated but got all huffy about journalistic ethics when it came out that one of the bloggers had contributed to the campaign of a local congressperson.)

The post drew comments from the paper's ombudsman, the blogger in question and from Jay Rosen, NYU journalism prof and blogger.

Jeff elevated Rosen's comment in a subsequent post. That practice is part of what makes Jeff's comments so rich. His own contribution to the comment conversations is another factor, I think. (But he never just thanks people for compliments and turns the thing into a guestbook.) Of course his stature helps draw star commenters, and comments by the people he references.

Only one thing could be improved: there's such a lot of back and forth in the comments that I'd like to read them threaded. (I prefer threaded message boards to the linear style, too. That's always a good debate, but always seems to end in a stalemate like other matters of habit and tech religion, or I guess like any issue that has two entrenched camps.)

Gillmor Facebook group experiment 

And speaking of guestbooks, I might as well offer a suggestion for Steve Gillmor's Facebook group.

He's set up the Gillmor Group to house the new incarnation of the Gang podcast (formerly known as the Gillmor Gang). The first episode, recorded last Friday, is up, and it's planned to resume as a weekly show.

He wants listeners to join the group, I'm guessing because he wants to experiment with the Facebook space (or "container" ;-) ) in a new way. Good for him. It'll be interesting to see how it works and what he does with it.

Facebook doesn't work so well for the purpose right out of the box, like there's no podcast feed. Last time I checked in, Steve reported on the group page that he's working on that. I didn't even see a link for an MP3 download and listened to the podcast using the Flash player inside the group, which reminded me of before-my-time pictures of people gathered around the radio in the living room, watching it. I suppose I could have looked at the source and found the direct link that way.

I wouldn't need the feed if I had the download link, since I don't catch podcasts. When I sub to a feed with enclosures in Bloglines I just use the download link anyway, so I can be more selective about what I put on my MP3 player.

I noticed that commenters are using the wall, not the comments for each post or the message board. I'd see if I could hide every place to comment except for the message board, and get some discussion going on the issues discussed in the podcast. Make it less like a guestbook or reception line ("Nice to be here" "Thank you for coming") and more like a confab.

Later: OK, I see it now. The title of the posted item is the link to the MP3.