We are entering the era where successful blogging will be the domain of already successful, high visibility figures like pg or Fred Wilson. The attempts of the popular blogs to 'scale' (which basically meant delegating content-creation to poorly-paid underlings who fight over ever-shrinking scoops) have failed miserably. (Personally, I don't touch lifehacker or techcrunch with a 10-foot pole these days, to name two I used to read).
The central problem, I believe, is that we don't have a good model to predict a piece of information's relevance to a given reader. So far in human history the mechanisms that solve this problem have been ad hoc and error-prone - only by luck do you ever 'fall in with the right crowd' and start to get the information that you craved all along. Personally I feel strongly that this is a solvable problem, and when it is solved it will change human society forever.
The central problem, I believe, is that we don't have a good model to predict a piece of information's relevance to a given reader. So far in human history the mechanisms that solve this problem have been ad hoc and error-prone - only by luck do you ever 'fall in with the right crowd' and start to get the information that you craved all along. Personally I feel strongly that this is a solvable problem, and when it is solved it will change human society forever.