Snappy the Clam: Big or small 'd'?

OK, here's one I don't get. I'm seeing a contradiction between the utopian "the web levels all boats" one gets in the more rah-rah quarters of the web and the increase in the broadcast model (in other words, the web becomes increasingly like tv - one-way) one sees as you approach the A-List end of a Shirky-style power law curve. David Weinberger:

So, what lessons do we learn about leadership on the Web? That the people we pay attention to are the ones who speak not at us and not to us but with us. We listen to them carefully because they are so interesting, so wise, and even so funny. We learn that leadership isn't a quality that necessarily spreads across all areas and topics: the person who is worth listening to about, say, technology may be just another jerk when it comes to raising children. And we learn the lesson that is most troubling to marketers, businesses and real-world leaders of all sorts: We learn that we, talking together, are smarter, wiser, and more interesting than any single leader could ever hope to be.

But then we get this regarding the A-List (and thank God they finally after all this time admit one exists):

Clay in February checked Technorati to see the distribution of links and found a power law curve: a very rapid collapse and then a long, slow tail. (Clay says that Jason Kottke had the same idea at the same time.) This is definitely not a bell curve. Most bloggers have less than average traffic. Half the link density is taken up by just 5% of the weblogs. And adding more bloggers makes the curve even steeper: if you start a blog, you are likely to link to one of the top weblogs but they are quite unlikely to link to you.

The links in the tail tend to be among people linking to one another, the pattern of a dinner party. At LiveJournal, people aren't posting in public; they're posting to friends. "You could go down to the mall and sit in the food court, and listen in on a conversation among a bunch of teenagers ... but you're the weird one, not them.")

The links at the top form a broadcast pattern. Glenn Reynolds can't link back to everyone who links to him. He has too many readers to be able to open up comments.

So where, then, is this "conversation" with the "leaders" happening? Who is doing this "talking together?" Or is this just more air cover for what appears to rapidly becoming a Good Old Bloggers network? Why is the system all open in the tail, but increasingly closed as you go up? I think you also need to take into account relationships outside the blog, i.e. the professional and personal relationships in the BigBlog world which existed before or alongside the BigBlogs themselves.

Snappy the Clam

Chowder is evil.

Big or small 'd'?