Mini-Microsoft:

Moderation. So I know you have Clay Shirky talking about it and folks like me and Scoble living it, but what is the solution? It seems that blogging as a communication medium is prone to entropy the more successful a blog becomes... perhaps comments should be tiered so that there is always a secondary page one can go to for all submitted comments and elevated comments ( either by the owner or readers ) can make their way onto the main blog page to ascend next to the main post's text. Kind of like Slashdot, just without the one-liner noise of each filtered message.

It's simply human nature at work. As any communications forum becomes popular, the number of troll comments rises - it's happened on old-time BBS systems, USENET, Slashdot... etc. Not a big shocker that the popular blogs have the same problem. Heck, look at any popular political blog and you'll see one of two things:

• No comments allowed (i.e., link from your own darn blog)
• An ever growing, more and more useless comment section

It's just the way things work