The distinction between blogs and newspapers blurs.
A few years ago I used to get laughed at when I suggested that the model for amateur online diarists would be that for global media corporations. De facto, this is now true.
There is something so fundamental and powerful about the reverse chronological list that it couldn’t be any other way, however recently something interesting has happened.
Blogs are becoming more like news sites like CNN, a cover page with multi column snippet digests being slapped on the front to draw people in.
The Huffington post was the first blog to do this and now Talking Points Memo has followed suit.
Chatting with Nick Denton the other day we came to the agreement that traditional blog layouts don’t pull repeat readers (not SEO traffic) into the site, off the front page, very well. News sites like CNN get 10 page views per visit, whereas Gawker sites get less than 2.
Although page views don’t strictly mean much in the days of Ajax driven sites (Nielsen announced today they are no longer going to count them), the design of newspapers and the design of blogs are merging, setting the standard for online publishing.