While tags would help, I guess what I am also asking for is a comments section that operates at the topic level, rather than at the post level.

Sure, you could tag each of your posts. But then the comments threads would still be per-post. There wouldn’t be any sort of tag-global, or topic-global, way of carrying on a discussion around that topic.

So tags are a good first step, but blogging platforms as a whole still need to evolve. Tags don’t solve everything.

Oh, and I’d seen Greg’s blog before, but this was a good reminder to add it to my reader. Thanks!

I’d much rather see a blog that was arranged topically, with clusters of posts on similar themes. That way, comments and participation in the blog wouldn’t just disappear as time and posts marched on, but could be organized into some sort of database of knowledge and/or into a more permanent ongoing discussion about interesting, broad, recurring themes.

Within a theme, time-based linearity would still be ok, to some degree.

But what I really dislike about blogging is how broad themes get overwritten and lost, because of this “sort by recency” organization.

(To a certain extent, Greg Linden does a nice job of overcoming this problem by, in a current post, linking back to the 2, 3 or sometimes even 5 previous posts that he’s done over the past few years that are related to the current topic. But as nice of a job as he does at this, it’s still very much a manual process, and recent, interesting comments on those older posts still get lost forever just through the very organizational nature of the blog.)

Hey, that’s a similar problem, almost, to the issue of a linear presentation of ranked results with in search engines! Just going through search engine results linearly, like going through blog posts reverse-time linearly, obscures larger trends in the data!

So maybe all I am asking is for you to reinvent the whole platform of blogging. But seriously, blogs need some way of pooling broader discussion and participation beyond just the per-post comments section.