1) The other day I came across Philly Future, which aggregates Philadelphia blogs using RSS/Atom and does its best to filter the content by relevance. The reaction so far looks good, although the human editor seems to be a little bit overwhelmed -- maybe it needs some automation? I don't know whether Philly Future is even on the radar screen of this debate, but my guess is we'll see more of the homegrown/aggregation approach, and that it will be more successful as media than attempts to hybridize blogs and traditional media.
2) And the folks over at Begging to Differ have created a bulletin board as a new format for discussion, which will either be very productive or devolve into shameless partisan bickering. Vanilla BTD usually does the former, which is pretty impresive considering the array of political views there -- but I suspect this will be harder, since the BTD-folk themselves will have less control of the discussion. Either way, I like the fact that they've taken an existing community and overlaid a broad, largely unfocused topic of discussion. Most bulletin boards do exactly the opposite.
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