Joseph Duemer has posted an interesting link to an article about how blog discussions develop, complete with diagrams.

I'm sympathetic to Duemer's desire to have some kind of blog-hand that would pull together and sort all the threads of a discussion--being a big sorter and sum-upper myself--but admit that I sort of like the decentralized model of blogging, in part because I like the pace it sets to a discussion--you have to go out and seek out others' responses and then compose your own without them all landing in your inbox. If the model of "progress" in discussion is, say, the Poetics list--ugh.