You put your finger on an interesting distinction that Doc Searls and others have made, between blogs that don't link and those that do. I.e., the "comfortable" sameness of ideologues who are reassuringly the same day after day will please some, but turn off others. Blogs that are interacting with what is going on elsewhere seem richer, more alive. Doc is a good example of someone who brings sharp intellect to a wide variety of interests, offering rich cross sections of time, place, persons. It's at bottom a key difference between inert print and bouncy blogging.

I'm trying to think about the differences and similarities between newspapers and blogs - newspapers are like a physical central gathering point for a bunch of blogs, which have been grouped together (generally) by a point of view, philosophy, ideology.

Blog-related software that helps us manipulate what feeds our input (RSS), and then manipulate our output, puts us (the individual) in the position of editor.

What we sometimes transcend, in the act of exploring other blogs and our own thoughts, is our own narrow point of view - just like when we read the Manchester Guardian or Al-Jazeera instead of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Moving up a level, as blogging grows and matures, popular blogs will probably become more and more like existing newspapers. Readers will trust (or not) a certain POV, and will be surprised, shocked or otherwise affected when they encounter perspective that they did not expect.

I've heard that we humans like niches, vertical categories that can help us understand or grasp what someone else says or is doing. I also think that most of us don't like to work to hard at understanding what's in front of us or what has been presented to us.

So with blogs. There are those who will savour shifting context, meaning, understandings and will seek it out - many others will go to a given blog for more of the same, or because they "feel" accepted or part of a connection - just as readers of newspapers develop preference for one over another.

I agree with Anne's key point - any "mechanism" that filters, that aggregates - must have a logic behind or in it, and this will impose some form of "control".

This is, I think, just like the notion that there are fundamental assumptions (often unconscious) about how things are done that become embedded in the code of software, thus limiting other (serendipitous ?) dicoveries and possibilities.

Who and what gets to call the shots about "organizing" the blogosphere? Another world, another power struggle ?