I think the mass media has given up the innovation in that area as blogs now consist of the comments section for the newspapers and magazines. Blogs have the added advantage that the blogger gets to put up their own colours and have their friends comment too.
The problem with this is that blogs are largely a ghetto of webpages read by five people including the writer. Even if you cobble together
working
technology - and trackback/pingback/whateverback don\'t count cause they don\'t work very well at this problem - to gather many many blogs into a cloud of likes, threading conversations and all, then you haven\'t got a flashmob, you\'ve got a flash diaspora. It\'s been tried; I know of one very smart lady,
burningbird
who tried it and, last I heard, ran into a brickwall.
Maybe
del.icio.us
tags will help, creating ad hoc folksonomies to pull together threads of many blogs into a cloud, and maybe comment feeds to thread it up, and then getting Blogger and Typepad/Movable Type and LJ (hell, even Scoop and Slash and PHP/Post Nuke) on board...well there\'s a lot of maybes and co-ordination there.
Or we can get the MSM to play ball and stop being precious. And if not that, we circumvent them.
Don\'t get me wrong, blogs play an important role in debate. It\'s just that I think it could be so much better.
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