Successful blogs - conversations - and the inescapable Clay Shirky!

In an email exchange earlier today*, I commented:

“There are relatively few successful blogs.

Plenty generate lots of comments and maintain a loyal readership, but few seem to make a difference.

The best ones have feedback from the original post author mid comment stream - a bit like a teacher joining in a classroom discussion, rather than just sitting behind their desk and listening in to everyone else chatting about her lesson. But that means that the [poster] gets sucked into the debate.”

And I wondered what you thought?

What blogs do you rate as successful in conducting meaningful conversations and engaging in debate, as opposed to posters stating their existing opinions and then moving off to the next rant ignoring any kerfuffle they’ve kicked off?

Last night, (still) reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, I found the section that observes (and I paraphrase) that authors of the most popular blogs have no chance to engage with the hundreds of comments each of their posts attracts. But smaller blogs with a lot less than a hundred readers can form a community with genuine conversations between commenters. Makes sense.

* “Today” was the 22 November 2007. Some blog post drafts take a while to be posted. But this seemed like a good one for the 1000th post.