Programmers and computer scientists may appreciate the discussion about dynamic and static typing happening on the weblog of one Robert C. Martin (the discussion is happening in the 'comments' box linked from the bottom).

Although the discussion is interesting, it illustrates for me the problems of weblog 'comment' mechanisms. The discussion is repetitive and people keep making the same points in different words, probably not realizing it. It's hard to keep up with the discussion because there's a lot of text to read and most of the authors are hopping in and out, developing their thoughts on other sites, and it's hard to collect that whole discourse together. A lot of participants in this discussion are there because the article was linked by another site that they follow regularly, so a writer may be responding more to some burning questions from elsewhere than to those in the present discussion.

It's like when you're at a cocktail party talking with some people about giant insects, and you overhear bits of talk in an adjacent group. "Are you guys talking about left-handed Armenian poets of the 14th century?" you say [Apologies, HB]. "I took a class on that once. My favorite line was. . ." Then it turns out they were talking more about modern left-handed poets and only mentioned in passing the 14th-century Armenian variety.

A challenge, then, for makers of social technology: we have a polyphony of different voices and centres of discussion, which is good; now how about finding ways to collect this information, to help disparate discussions to cohere? Bringing together discussions from many different places may sound like the job of news aggregators, but those have the opposite effect to what I'm looking for: aggregators are more like magazines, offering a smorgasbord of different topics by different authors, so that you can stay on top of a variety of streams. I want something that will help me to congeal all the discussions about, say, "dynamic typing in programming languages," into one ready reference card, that would help the participants to converge on a consensus of terminology and background while retaining the variety of opinions and goals. Is this conceivable? To what extent can people share discursive space and at the same time not share it? How difficult is it to "listen in" on similar conversations while maintaining your own?