Sometimes it is hard to see threads of discussions in blog land because you may only be reading a subset of the blogs involved in the discussion. In this case, I just happened to be subscribed to many of the blogs in this thread. First let me lay out the timeline of posts:

Jeff Atwood published his post Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order

Ian Griffiths responds with post entitled Natural Sorting in C#

Charles Petzold responds with Sorting Without Spaces

Dare Obasanjo responds with his post Natural Sort in IronPython vs. C# 2.0

Now these are some pretty big names to have both reading your blog and responding on their own blog. And according to technorati, there are 9 blog reactions to Jeff's post. That is pretty impressive. That makes Jeff Atwood a very influential blogger in my book.

If this were my timeline, it would look more like this:

Luke published his post on Asp.Net Control For Google Charts

Luke's Mom emails him and says, "I read your new blog post and I didn't understand a word you said but great job!"

Luke's Wife calls him and says, "Your Mom really likes your new blog post."

Trackback spam responds to Luke's post: "Want to buy some ViAGra?"