What about message boards? (Score 1)

As many folks on the thread have pointed out, the value of blog entries depends on the reader's context. If you're interested in following someone's life or listening to what they have to say, blogs are fabulous mechanisms. You are probably interested in your friends' blogs. If you're a golfer, chances are you'd be interested in golfers who blog about their experiences.

Though it seems to me that if you're interested in a particular subject, rather than a specific person, good old message boards like phpBB or VBulletin, Usenet newsgroups, or forums like Slashdot, are much better vehicles for sharing information. In these cases, you care more about the topic and not so much who it is that's doing the writing. Rather than trying to harvest relevant content about a subject from blogs, maybe we're just better off posting on message boards to begin with? You hear a lot nowadays about blogs nowadays and how great they are, but not a whole lot of noise about message boards and discussion forums. Why is that? They seem like just different ways of equal value for people to contribute information to the community.

I've been helping out some friends who are putting together a site for people to add comments to web pages. I don't know if it's up yet, but here is an example of another mechanism, sort of in between the two, where you can either follow a particular subject or a particular author without too much difficulty.