The Annotated New York Times organizes distributed threads of blogged discussion around the front page of the New York Times. What’s fascinating here is that the democratizing of writing on the Web in the form of blogging does not obviate the desire for some organizing principle — no matter how arbitrary. There’s a role-change here for traditional media outlets, relied upon for their organizing principles (whether those be around people, things, current events, locale, interests, or what-have-you), from producer to aggregator. As a NYT reader, I can take in the morning news and then stroll the ripples these stories made in the blogosphere. While this results in an fairly limited world view, it trumps the information overload of the general RSS aggregator (and the associated log in > (optionally) take in a few feeds > mark all read > log out pattern) on those particularly busy days.
