The thing this site needs is a better internal hyperlinking system. You should be able to post a "diary" response to a diary antry or article, and that would set up at least two links:

• First, you'd get a link from the diary entry to the comment.

  ajt's comment about the slashdot scheme effectively dumping everything but the first few comments is an issue. It would be better to have recent responses queued up, then a link to a page with all of the comments in order.

• Second, you'd get a link from your diary entry to the diary entry that you responded to.

  It'd be part of the entry, so you could stick it inline somewhere where it makes sense. Like my link to ajt's page.

The more hyperlinks you get in something like this the better.

Oh, and it'd be nice if you could use <dl> lists