Yesterday I attended the online community session of Web2Open, a barcamp-like meeting going on within Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo. (The Expo has a huge number of attendees, it's doing very well.)

I put forward a number of questions I've been considering for later posts, but one I want to make here is this: Where has the innovation been in online discussion software? Why are most message boards and blog comment systems so hard to use?

I know this is true because huge numbers of people are still using USENET, and not just for downloading binaries. USENET hasn't seen much technical innovation since the 80s. As such, it's aging, but it shouldn't be simply aging, it should have been superseded long ago. We've gone through a period of tremendous online innovation in the last few decades, unlike any in history. Other old systems, like the Well, continue to exist and even keep paying customers in spite of minimal innovation. This is like gopher beating Firefox, or a CD Walkman being superior in some ways to an iPod. It's crazy. (The users aren't crazy, it's the fact that their choice is right that's crazy.)