Early consensus on The Conversation?

The Conversation launched, buzzed, and now what? Made an impression? Filled a much needed hole in social media and online blogging? Changed the way the creative industry accesses and shares information?

I've bookmarked it, I check it most days as I do with many other blogs, and, quite frankly, I am far from captivated by it. Rather than let my tongue form too much of a barb I decided to bullet-point my impressions of it; keep it simple stupid, if you will.

• It seems to me that a lot of The Conversation is shameless self-promotion. Far from criticising self-promotion (as a graduate I need to jump on that band-wagon as much as the next job-seeker), I do, however, object to having to sift through the dust to get to the diamonds.
• The majority of decent blog posts from the big names are featured on their personal/company blogs anyway, so it seems The Conversation serves as a kind of character-limitless Twitter where people can promote their blog posts for the time they can keep them in 'recent entries'. Surely Twitter does a similar thing, right? In all honesty, I'd rather read a blog post that someone tweets about than puts on The Conversation. I say this because the people I follow on Twitter are people I follow for a reason; The Conversation has no such filter system. Is this too cynical/snobbish an opinion?
• I know there is mixed opinion regarding where the line is drawn between Marketing and PR; however, I feel The Conversation would certainly benefit from some such differentiation. Granted, I am interested in what both sides of the coin have to say, but I like to know which side of the coin I'm listening to before I engage. Could The Conversation be split a little into more specific field areas? Perhaps I'm naive, but would a tech PR really care what a marketer in finance thinks about stuff, or vice versa?
• It's a little cumbersome. Put simply, the website isn't the slickest I've ever seen, and is a little disappointing given the size and reputation of the body it serves. My main issue is the inaccessibility of past content. If I neglect to log on for a day or two, I may miss a wonderful article by someone unknown to me because it is not displayed and I cannot check up on the author since I am oblivious to them; ergo, opportunity missed.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh. In fact, I am being a little harsh. The website is clearly still in the development stage and, no doubt, much consideration is being taken to improve it according to the feedback (positive and negative) they have no doubt received from many areas. But, I can't help but express the same concerns I first voiced upon hearing about the endeavour: should there be more exclusivity similar to a LinkedIn group, for example. More policing of content and marking of content that is irrelevant.

My last post on this topic got some great responses from a great mix of people, and one concern I particularly liked came from Lyanna Tsakiris who pointed out that exclusivity rather defeats the object of social media and networking. I agree, and realise my rather exclusivist stance wasn't ideal; but, The Conversation seems to have landed a little too close to my conservative worries. There are posts on there that bear no relevance to anything and are surely of little interest to many people. Do others share this concern?

I can't help but feel like the website needs to open up a little in terms of feedback from those who contribute. Similar to Tripadvisor, for example, where each contributor builds up a profile of involvement, if you will. If a post is irrelevant then people should be able to label it as such and put it up for verification. Equally, those contributors who most interest you should be able to be put into a kind of 'favourites' section for you to gain easy access to who you pay most attention to. Much like Twitter, you can choose to pay attention to the people who interest you, and ignore those who do not — and I mean that in the most liberal way where we are free to make those decisions ourselves.

The consensus upon launch was 'wait and see'; I wonder what people think after the initial introduction?