Connecting in comment threads and through cross linking is a bloggerific way to communicate.

And happy birthday, Jon!

Thanks, Frank!

I think it depends on the blogger and their blog. I tend to move the conversation around my corner of the blogsphere. If the bloggers and commenter are conversational... then no, conversation based community hasn't died. I think the tendency is for bloggers not to engage their readers like you would on a discussion board. I support your points about traversing mediums, as well as point to the whole meetup phenomena (I organize the blogger meetup here in Cleveland, lots of conversations there).

well,
it's partly true,
but then - it's a very distracted way of communicating. skip here, skip there - those are tiny bits of conversations, impressions, moments of connection. dialogue has never been about skipping channels, and it doesn't seem to be changing. that's why it's more difficult to create serious dialogue without stopping a bit longer in one "area", whether that be a topic or a means of communication. of course, someone can write an e-mail after reading a post on a blog, but a true exchange of opinions that endures to move something forward is very rare. we seem to think we don't have time for it - there are so many other bits and pieces we have to check out...

http://new-art.blogspot.com

When I read any social group talking about how a medium they are a part of has "died", I laugh, and then I laugh. And then I laugh some more.

People are people. They will express themselves given whatever medium they are presented with, online and off. If the medium lacks sufficient feedback and bandwidth for them to express themselves adequately, they will expand it via their own means.

The arrival of new variations on the infinite Human Conversation that has happened and will continue to happen will be what it always is; an ever-changing, ever-shifting cloud of thought which has think and thick spots. Getting hung up on where the cloud is floating is a fool's game.

Blogs and VCs compete for time. And if you're going to believe that bastard McLuhan, you'd have to admit that the difference in format is going to color the style of communication.

The Well, Brainstorms and the ilk are gated-community schools of deep social thought. You might find Socrates or Thomas Moore (the original) at one of these. Blogs are a little wilder, sidewalk cafes in Paris where revolution is plotted.

Both are conversations, yet with a sharp difference. Which will win in the Darwinian struggle? Look how some blogs, dailyKos et cetera, are morphed into forum-like creatures.; the whole thing is a made point, however, because semiotics is dead. In ten years there will be no way in hell to communicate with another human being.

FWIW,; from the first announcement of "What It Is, Is Up to Us," I imagined that the heroic Electric Minds was going to be a Village of Blogs. This is impossible. It was before I and the rest of the world knew about Justin, the grandfather of the bloggers--, and before blog had been minted.

But still it is true, that's what I thought. EM would be a multi-tiered playground of thought where each participant would control her textual and graphic identity amidst a grand conversation. And it will always be thus. In my mind.