Communities of Scale (2)
Beyond the infrastructure, you have to think about how the content of all those weblogs scales. Sure, you can put 10-20k weblogs on a single static server and fit the 5-10 required servers in a rack. (Note: I don't know a whole lot about the resources required for this; I'm trusting John Robb's numbers here.) But how can you find what you're looking for over 10-20k weblogs?
It's very easy to throw hardware and bandwidth at sites and make them scale. The costs are more or less distributed depending on your architecture. What's difficult is building a scalable community, of finding like-minded souls. And thus we have the Radio Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem, blogdex and others — or the less-sophisticated GeoCites Member Pages directory.
[The Peanut Gallery]
This point can't be emphasized enough. Without some kind of way of either organizing or being able to search (or filter) the information on a large number of weblogs, you end up with the chaos that is the Web, albeit on a smaller scale (but without Google!). So it is crucial to be able to organize those weblogs into some kind of useful structure.
I'm watching the action on the ecosystem/indexing front to see what happens. (And participating on the blogchalk front, although the organizational scheme and the idea behind it is much less formal or useful compared to, say, the Blogging Ecosystem.
8:20:06 AM 
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