DISQUS

Interesting thought there . And Indeed, many thanks to factors that led to democratization of meeting tools. But still, apart from the technology aspect I think the shift in collaborative tendencies of people in general, increasing complexities of work (which eventually means more discussion points) and decentralization of work places are key drivers of the long tail.

The one-to-many model of SAAS(software as a service) is a perfect 2.0 philosophy example. Nothing else has leveraged 2.0 techs more than the software vendors of SAAS products.

Google being the front runner with its product suite consisting of ( GMail, GDocs, GReader etc) has convinced people using desktop clients to shift to web as the working alternative.

Salesforce.com, Oracle On-Demand, Office Live and many others are quintessential of how SAAS philosophy has materialized in form of grown up web applications based on 2.0 tech stack.

Jake,

I think primarily there are two things which can improve the traffic flow :

1. Changing the template/theme of the page. Personally I find that although it's really cool and soothing, it's over simplistic which means from a visitors point of view that it has not much to offer.

The layout has to be more concrete and contemporary and dynamic, because as of now it looks more of a retro style with static content.

Don't know how much of a change is possible at all.

Of course the concern about feed traffic going down is more of a content issue and for that -

2. Open up the space for more writers, I think we need more types of articles from different people on a wide ranging topics, rather than read what a bunch of you 'big hammer' guys want to make us all read [:P].

Again the content can be moderated.

HTH,
Shishir