Chat plus Blog equals Chlog?

One of my friends, Peg, from Tufts logs for Wetmachine, a technocentric blog. This article is germane to Josh's and Jeff's grappling with the discussion/feedback issue. The article focuses a bit on chatting versus conventional web feedback. But I wonder, how is the current web feedback mechanism really all that different from Instant Messenging, for instance? What if a bunch of people posted at about the same time, to some discussion (http) based webpage? If we strip out most of the identifiers, leaving only the name and time stamp, what should appear is a series of short ports, amounting to a conversation (we can also shut off signatures). That should make the display more compact. But how is this different from a live chat? Am I missing something here?

If you set up a time for people to gather and post, all that's missing from an http standpoint is an automatic client refresh, triggeredy by every new post. Even better; hasn't anyone come up with a java/javascript text entry window that allows this text to be appended, with proper HTML formating, into some existing web page? The alternative is for any live chat to be "dumped" in HTML and appended to a web page for archiving. Just a few thoughts.