It's interesting you would write this the same week as Google Reader was choked to death.

Conversation briefly moved from forums to blogs for a while in the early 2000s with the idea of linkbacks. A conversation would start on one blog then someone would comment on it on their own blog and commenters would attach onto each of the blog entries that followed. The net-net was that we had a widely distributed, content-creator controlled (as in you own your own words) system leveraging the internet. RSS served as the glue that tied it all together.

But long thought, long discussions, is hard. And most people can't sustain it for a long period (witness the rate of abandonment on blogs) so the lure of shorter, pithier systems (Twitter, Facebook) pushed the "conversation" to that state of fortune cookie thinking.

Thanks for highlighting this as an issue but I'm afraid those of us who enjoy real discourse are on the losing side of a trend that seems to value short form over long.