i definitely get your point about creating an active community of bloggers that will cause the conversation to spill over into discussion boards.

and kda research offers an interesting service.

however, i think the latent need is to search these "dark matter" areas and/or be alerted when the conversation is appropriate to my company.

the chatter between email, IM and chat will obviously never be indexed nor searchable, but there is no reason why discussion boards can't be indexed and searched.