Daniel Gross of Slate says that it's the Twilight of the Blogs and Dave Winer responds, "To say blogging is dead is as ridiculous as saying email or IM or the telephone are dead". Scoble says, "I’ve been blogging for more than five years now and the “blogging is a fad” meme is one that consistently is reborn every five months."
HOW TO PRESENT ARCHIVED MATERIAL
I've been thinking about the blog format lately and wondering how to get a handle on both presentation of new content and archived material. Blogs are bad at presenting archives. You've got to drill down to much to find hte good stuff. They're also not so great at displaying video content.
Look at what Four Eyed Monters is doing to display their last six video podcasts. I like that and have played with something similar, Broadcast Machine.
JOINING A LARGER COMMUNITY
I've been spending some time over on MySpace recently. I like the community over there. I have 45 friends. [ Warning: Click that link and music plays! ] I normally wouldn't play music when a page loads, it's so 1980. But on MySpace it's kinda fun.
Demitri Martin has 18,541 friends. A few days ago he only had 9,000. That was until his video from The Daily Show went up on Google Video.
Community sites that get your content a bigger audience are interesting. I could just post my content over here on this little blog, or I could also share it else where and gain a larger audience. I like having it live in one place, but also want it to gain a larger audience. Directories help, but are so large that your content can get lost there too.
HUMAN FILTERS
Human filtered, selective directories like TopTenSources are one way of narrowing down the wealth of content in directories. Look what they put together for Boston. Here they choose ten bloggers and consolidate their content via RSS.
My favorite human filter is Adam Gaffin. He picks the best of Boston blog posts over at Universal Hub. I know Adam. I enjoy the posts he picks. I read him daily.