My profiles:
"At the core, we're aiming for high quality, involved conversation about things we care about. You have to have a high tolerance for noise to glean the gems, and quality sites/lists either keep their existance hidden or quickly degenerate without moderation. Either that, or nothing happens."
Right now, my opinion is that it takes a lot of resources to make discussion happen (be it on discussion groups based on e-mail or the web) and it takes even more to keep it from degenerating into slashdotian, mostly meaningless noise. As David Carter-Tod writes, connecting (blog-based) monologues into dialogues is a working compromise. Here I control my end of the discussion, as every other reader/writer does. I monitor many RSS-supporting sites with MUOTD, and conversations do bounce from place to place, in a curious asynchronous and multi-directional way. (Do -onous and -tional words make me sound more authoritativational?)
Speaking of MUOTD, I just discovered you can access it from different PCs. 07/15/01 update: while we're at it, Craig Burton has a tutorial for remote access.