For those who haven't followed the bizarre story of Jason Kottke's Matrix Re-Loaded thread, a discussion began in comments attached to his posting about the film and quickly took on a life of its own:

At last count (mid-afternoonish on June 17th), people have left 700 comments in the thread attached to that entry (7 of which are mine). Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that's about 3.3 150-page books. The HTML file is in excess of 1.3 MB in size, has been viewed about 5000 times in the past two weeks (during which about half of the comments were left), and is responsible, all by itself, for 5.3 gigabytes of data transferred from kottke.org this month.

Now, Jason asks the question: Who owns the conversation on my web site? (kottke.org) It is a fascinating tale, and begs several questions about the rights and responsibilities that flow from operating online social spaces of any kind.