From the study: "In fact, the chaos of the bulletin board and the chat room can have a profoundly negative effect upon the overall quality of conversation, a new study concludes. But when the talk moves into a less freewheeling environment, the level of the debate seems to improve." ETP shares characteristics of both, and I don't know of any other similar situations, except for other weblogs communities (inasmuch as you can even draw a line).
The study I brought up because it challenges some of the assumptions of the necessities for good community. It helps to be identified (as we are), it's good to stay small. In a sense, ETP retains that advantage by spontaneously connecting communities as necessary, just as today, Carpe Diem and On Deciding... Better, yet today we form a larger community via those connections. That is what I found interesting. Benefits of small communities, as the study outlines, yet together, we form a large one.
"As a community of webloggers, are we participating in a great dialogue or are we each just engaging in self-gratification with our monologues?" Yes. Both. It is the mixture that is interesting. I choose to respond to David. I could have ignored him, and it would seem I never saw it; at least, you'd never be able to prove otherwise. Small communities can form around specific weblogs (even 'communities' of one), keeping some of the small feel, yet interacting within a larger community, gaining some of the benefits of the larger community.
Carpe Diem: "Jeremy compares the Reality Check experiment with the EditThisPage.com community. That's interesting, but I'm not sure the comparison is valid." I agree... the comparision isn't valid, esp. in the technical sense of the term. Some of the ideas can be applied, though.
Let's try something else to seperate stories here...
EditThisPage.com: We ARE a Community: "Is Edit.This.Page.com a community? Or are we just a collection of individuals--men and women isolated on lonely islands (or weblogs)?" A good wrap up to today's "conversation".
I used to think weblogs were over-rated, even avoided the term, because I agree with those who say that this is not a fundamentally new type of web site, and they are nothing to get excited about. The community that may form from a large number of people using them, however, may just be something to get excited about.
Expect me to mumble some more about communities in the future. I like what I see here; a bunch of people, communicating, a system that encourages polite behavior (or you are ignored, even more so then on the Usenet). New dynamics at work! Not totally new, of course, but new nevertheless. I like this. I don't just want iRights to explore the wrong ways of doing business, like Boundary Breakers, I want to explore the right ways too, which is hard to do when you just read the news 
.
This might explain the difficulty in getting a decent discussion going in these communities; those likely to post are likely to already have their own weblog, and do it there instead.
This implies that to be fair I need to create my own list of blogs-I-like. I'll get to that sometime, I guess.