…blogs are still blogs, and the big ticket is the writers, not the brand.

I think what we may have here is the beginnings of a separation of multi-author blogs into two camps. On the one hand, we’ll have those who fully embrace things like Ghostlightning’s templates, who may even have some kind of editorial direction; these blogs, concerned with “brand” over individual writers, will basically be magazines, and will probably stand to accrue larger followings than the second kind of blog. Then you’ll have blogs that are more or less open forums for writers, which is how I see Super Fanicom. In lieu of editorial control, these blogs hand-pick those writers who seem to best suit their general goals, provide for them an environment that lets them write in whatever way suits them best, and place them in close proximity to people with whom they can engage in joint projects, if they so desire. On the one hand, you have a magazine, and on the other, you have something more akin to a seminar (maybe not the best word, but a better word for the model eludes me). The question of which approach is best may depend upon the blog’s general subject matter and goals.

Let me emphasize that I don’t think one kind of blog is better than another. They both have their advantages. Blogs like OH! and THAT are ideal for reviews and the like, and have high content output and consistency, while blogs like this one are more conducive to exploratory writing and intellectualism (or so I like to tell myself :P). The former kind of blog is concerned more with readership, while the latter is concerned more with writers — as it’s all about discourse, the volume and quality of comments means far more than hit counts (though I’m not about to deny the correlation between the two).

The trial then becomes, how great/stable is the delivery system? On the level of a periodical, they can swap writers in and out if they wanted, and I’m sure they don’t use all the source material in the first place. Blogs aren’t that big, there isn’t a diverse meta presence above the writers. Team/Group/Multi-author blogs, whatever, so they have a captain, and maybe an editor, but before blogs can truly become greater than authors, there must be a strong presence and framework for it… unless OH! is doing that I don’t see where its different, and until I see a “blog” with 50+ authors, and direction from editors, and all that jazz.. blogs are still blogs, and the big ticket is the writers, not the brand.

Btw, there is a way to do this without the writers, and I’ve touched on it before. Aggregators do it brainless, while if you had a team of editors/readers/designers/content specialists, they could rely on the abundance of posts in this current ’sphere, and bring out something truly professional.

I messed up once, only because there were too many authors to list

but that’s probably indicative of something…

But something like my blog or WRL couldn’t exist any other way. It exists purely for the specific author. It is, in a sense our centralized feed and the only way that I really think an author can be dominant over a blog. And on a technical, practical matter, by concentrating my stuff, it helps to create a larger audience through things like SEO and convenience. By managing my brand, there aren’t really many more places where I really could go to get a larger audience, either because the traffic elsewhere wouldn’t be as high or because I wouldn’t be able to post there anyway because I’d be off-brand. I noticed this with things like when Random Curiosity randomly had editorials and people really didn’t care that much, since they visited that site to get early summaries and screencaps.