Suppose I told you the headline of this article was my own. Would you believe me? Could it be possible that I invented the calculus of my headline at roughly the same time as Ethan Johnson and then posted a little later with the only difference being that he utilized an extra, and optional, comma? Well it's possible but clearly I'm not telling the truth. You picked that up didn't you?

If you read regular web writers -- call 'em bloggers if you must -- then everyday you read the egomaniacal, the heart felt, the goofy, the cogent, the sycophantic, the miserable, the sublime, good, bad and indifferent. Regular reading instills a discipline of thought instantiation. By that I mean that you shape your thought patterns around arguments that are coincident, similar, suggestive or altering. For instance, some days blogger A may make sense to you and other days you'll wonder why you bother clicking the mouse on her feed. Always, one hopes, you are looking for new ideas, new feeds, new writers; weeding out the ones that don't seem to provide the value of positive or negative thought mathematics. If you read and move on most of the time, then the writing is no longer stimulating anymore; stimulation can be agreeable or disagreeable. The thing about writing is that it should provoke thought. Genuine writing is a rendering of perceived understanding, a creative act because it attempts to capture and convey; in turn it may incite more thought and more writing by others.

That is not conversation.

Having occasionally written about and accepted the written thoughts of Ethan over the years, as well as having had actual conversations with him -- you know with the full duplex, talking thing going on in real time -- he and I know there is a difference. There is no more a conversation taking place in the wider blog space than there is in the wider marketplace. The passage of time has shown us that markets are not conversations and there is no such thing as a real community embedded in any web site or grouping of sites. How ridiculous would it sound if somebody declared that "Newspapers are conversations". Sometimes literal meanings are really good for what they are; a conversation is about talk; not about words. Community is about people engaged in living in an area of reasonable proximity or familiarity. Community is not about reflective affinity; that's called empathy.

The empathetic nature of modern media causes certain thought leaders to attract followings of the like minded with the occasional sprinkling of the caustic. Mayhem ensues. While most of these people would never get in a street fight, they tend to slag each other in writing without a second thought. Could that be because the norms of standard conversation invoke a social protocol that leads to a shared attempt, at least initially, to get to an understanding? Has that happened during any part of the current A-list blogger dust-up? They're not having a conversation, they're having a turf war. It's a bunch of blather about ego that's worth several thousand dollars. We needn't waste any more time on the fiction of community or conversation in the web space.

But we will.