Tom follows up with some interesting ruminations about message board software. I've also had (far more hazy!) thoughts about this. In early January - when I was still struggling with the idea of having blog conversations over fences - I wrote this to Amy: 'maybe if a number of bloggers agreed to amalgamate as a notional collective, they could have a shared threaded bulletin board. I'm not sure what it would look like, but I keep thinking that for discussion bbs are the obvious solution, and maybe if the problems of synicating and threading comments and joining blogs were approached from the bb angle something new may emerge. This is likely silly, but let me freewheel for a minute. What if you had a bb as OPML, and the distributed data entries were individual's blogs in opml format - would there be a way in there of each person bringing not only their identity and changing/current thoughts as a blog into the discussion if you wanted to expand their file, but also a means of them commenting on each others thoughts? I've been thinking for a while now that maybe the internet has been devolving into smaller and smaller entities. You know, like when you made Pemberley and we discovered it, it seemed like a wonderful big coming together, and then you think of how things spun off into smaller sub-sections and now into individual blogs and identities and smaller particals in a mesh. It almost seems like a fractal to me sometimes, or a wave that built up and then broke and ran into smaller and smaller rivulets on the beach. But now I wonder if there seems to be a desire to group together in some new way, or a desire to try building while still keeping the identities syndicated and separate.': 

Conversation Gardens and Conversation Marketplaces: Tom's excellent and dryly humorous analogy for different conversations on the web. He sure nails the compartmentalism and control issues that plague message forums. I've been exploring around for a while now, not entirely happy with the forum I have been part of for some years, but also feeling that blog comments were more-often-than-not a poor substitute. I've just recently begun to feel more comfortable with this across-blog conversation process that Tom describes as the Marketplace, and feel the excitment of the possiblilies it offers, that it's a free-wheeling global conversation that doesn't have a central location, but that you can follow from one blogger to the next through referrals.