O nly rarely do blog entries start much of a conversation, and blogs become more like an odd, nearly formless form of magazine. It's more self-publishing than conversation starter. There is something essential to how blog sites are set up that seem to doom them to a cultural curiosity of the early 21^st century.

There are several problems with writing a blog, and they were why I never started a blog for a long time before the technical curiosity about making a blog system from scratch got the better of me. The main problem is that it creates an un-erasable public record of your thoughts, so it severely curtails what I'm willing to write about. The other, related problem is that when you do express an opinion on something, you've just shaved off some percent of your audience who aren't likely to stop by again, instead of creating follow-up conversation.

The biggest problem, it seems to me, is the generally unsatisfying nature of the discussion threads that attach to blog entries. This is a problem that no type of website has figured out, so it's not a blog-specific failing.

Where was I going with this? I lost track..