My last blog talked in unflattering terms about the BBC and their attempts to bring interactivity to their content.

It's probably fair to point out that the failure of Have Your Say to be a worthwhile part of the internet is not entirely of the BBC's own making. When you have a site as popular as news.bbc, any attempt at interactivity is going to be swamped early on by a huge range of participants - and if Internet discussion has taught us anything, it is that the burning outrage of crazies can easily filibuster away any rational participation.

Another disadvantage of scale can be seen at sites like Slashdot, DailyKos and FreeRepublic. The number of posts and comments in a day, or even an hour, make the sites daunting for an outsider and a full-time occupation for anyone who wants to be a regular participant. Slashdot, despite its karma system which allows better comments more prominence, presents a newcomer with a fearsome array of stories and comments that even as an experienced Internet user I find hard to understand.

In the political world, the successes - by which I mean sites where rational argument has half a chance - have tended to be the more academic sites, such as OpenDemocracy including the more specialist blogs. Also worth reading are sites that have grown organically, and have started from or discovered a clear 'house style'. A good example of the latter is Metafilter, a 'best of the web' site with an interest in politics. Overseen by three admins (the founder and two colleagues), a strict benign-dictator deletion policy keeps the front page free of spam and ranting, while participants have a strong sense of 'how things are done here', and debate to some extent polices itself.

A semi-success is the Guardian's Comment Is Free section, where articles (some from the newspaper) are put up for discussion. Although it shares some of the BBC's failings (no user profile pages, and no persistence of personality) the arguments have generally stayed at a higher level than the BBC's race hate and ignorance, though the level of cynicism about politics is just as high. Perhaps the tone of debate is in part due to the Guardian's more educated readership and smaller web presence. At least part of the reason must be the format - a well-written article starts off mosts discussions, and (unless the writer is a politician), this seems to encourage more thoughtful responses.