I like Zed’s idea of using Son of Sam for blog comments/e-mail discussion, it’s a really great idea. It’s perfect for sites with high comment rates that need to filter down noise in a discussion and foster some real thought churning. It may give the impetus for actual discussion instead of the common sounding off of anonymous trolls.
Zed’s really into rules (is this blog post even 500 words?), which makes perfect sense for high traffic sites, but a little less restriction on the length of time that a discussion can last and that a user can stay subscribed, it’d be really useful for folks like us who have a blog that does get comments but doesn’t have quite such a need for policing them and keeping the discussion on track.
An interesting marriage between the forum and the mailing list! Too bad the Son of Sam code isn’t up anymore, I’d be looking at it right now (despite my utter and complete aversion to Python). I even checked archive.org, I’m so curious.