Apparently people want to hold a threaded conversation across blogs. From what I can tell, the goal is to be able to reply to a specific comment in a blog as a Trackback and have the text from your Trackback appear as a reply to a specific comment. This creates threaded comments, with the comments coming from other blogs via Trackbacks.
Glenn Reid speculates about his version here and Roger Benningfield has been working on this for 5 years.
I'm usually idealistic about this type of thing. I usually think, man- that could really work- how cool! Not this time. I feel like this is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. As you've seen, I believe that blogs and message boards are two different things and they play two different roles. To morph them together may take the power away from each.
The biggest thing for me is lack of context. On a message board, all the replies and threads are within the context of the same space. Everyone that uses that space is using as a "place" that often has a culture and style of its own. The place is often the glue that holds things together.
The same thing is true for the blog readers who end up reading an out of context post that is actually a reply to some comment in another blog. I don't think that is very appealing.
In breaking discussion into individual blogs is to break the context of the discussion into individual writing styles and environments. Technologically it could be done, I just wonder if it *should* be done.
Roger acknowledges a similar concern this in his entry:
I think the idea itself may have limited appeal, though.
Blog entries are more like "seeder" posts in a forum... they typically stand alone reasonably well, and spur descendant discussion. I suspect that a blog which is full of conversational responses to entries in other spaces will read like crap when viewed in isolation.
Thanks to Nancy for the pointers.