Clay Shirky's article on the Echo rhubarb, the process underlying the feuding factions, and the contrasting affordances of the collaborative technology applied, is quite good. His discussion is less about the technical flaming and more about the differences between weblogs and wikis. In short, weblogs are egocentric while wikis damp vanity.
The essay hints at a real essence of how blogs and wikis should be married. I think there's one last element that's missing though. While wikis reflect consensus, and they track changes, they don't really track major consensus points. A wiki page can be quite inactive, at which point, you really want to take a snapshot and archive it somewhere, and then the page can become active again, e.g. new consensus is arrived at.
Hmmm, this may be one reason to understand network structure in a social media ecology. If you can model and detect the lifetime of a "story", you can determine when consensus has been reached and "history should be fixed". Of course things can and will change, but it's good to have snapshots of those collective synch points.
Memo to self: do some pruning on this weblog to see if we got Shirky's name right everywhere