Blogs increasing information scatter?

The other day I noticed something about the "blogosphere." It all started when I tried to search my blog, just as you'd search your gmail, for something I knew I had written. The search box at the top didn't show anything -- obviously at this point Google isn't indexing my blog. That's fine -- I've never submitted it to be indexed, and very rarely if ever linked to it from a place where google indexes.

But it made me think about something else. Obviously people who blog enjoy being read, or they'd just keep a diary, right? And part of the appeal of a blog is supposed to be its interactivity. I write here about the new Harry Potter book, and you post a followup telling me I'm a geek, and then some SA goon posts a slash image of Harry and Hagrid, and the collective concsiousness grows, or something. Anyway, I stumbled onto something the other day which relates to all this.

I've lost the links, but it's a trend you've probably seen if you read blogs at all -- Author A posts something, and Author B writes a reply ... in his own blog. Then he just replies in Author A's blog: "I replied -here-" with a link back to his own blog (probably in an effort to drive readers or search engines to his blog). The conversation probably ends here, but maybe not ... maybe people reply to one or the other, and maybe some of them use this self-promoting "I replied here" mechanism. You end up with this fragmented mess.

I wonder if this is common. I'm new to this whole blogging thing, as you can probably tell. But it seems like something which isn't rare, and isn't necessarily healthy....