Or, better yet (and this is a wild concept I know, but bear with me), get an RSS reader, find some blogs that *you* like and add them to your feed. Then you control the feed, not someone else.

Or, you know, be a shill and carry on with Twitter. :)

This is inappropriate. You're not even arguing against anything I'm saying. If there is an aggregation site that lets me subscribe to blogs based on a url (i.e. not something the aggregation site controls), then I AM controlling the feed. I'm just doing it with a much more robust syndication mechanism than RSS.

Actually that is something I was thinking about recently as well, and I wonder whether it already exists somewhere. To have a web forum site which works like a planet, but allows a registered user to comment on the blogs, vote on the posts and comments and provide some mechanism for moderators and invitation of new blogs to join it.

Most of the planets I know are usually maintained by group of people who already have their discussions sorted out in a different ways via mailing lists, forums, subreddits ... (eg. http://fedoraplanet.org/), so this is not something I have seen elsewhere.

It could be a value in this, esp. since people are less and less willing to maintain and moderate comments on their own blog sites, but for the same reason, it would not be that easy to bootstrap a community in this way, as someone will have to be responsible for it's operation, moderation, fighting spam and so on.

Yeah it's kind of strange to think about, honestly. We're so close. All the tech is there and well-understood. Yet nobody seems to have made it, yet.

But I guess I should be more clear about the pitch because I know it's a little obtuse. Rather than thinking about a centralized blogging platform as the solution, I see that as only one part (the lesser part) of the solution. The other part is the aggregation sites.

So, for the centralized blogging, you get seamless, free, hosted (no domain), and ANONYMOUS blogging (no registrations to track you). Easy sign up, collects many users, and broadcasts them to the aggregation sites.

The aggregation site, on the other hand, doesn't do any moderation, doesn't do any comment handling, doesn't do any filtering. It just collects a list of urls that people want to subscribe to (so that those urls can be advertised to others), and negotiates with those blog urls to get the other endpoints that will allow for realtime commenting and interaction with the blog, itself.

The centralized blog would be a lot like twitter, and it would handle its own content moderation, just like any large host would.

But "power users" would have their own blogs which, when rendered as iframes, provides them with the entire publishing power of the internet. That kind of richer content serves as a reason for people who want to make a living on the internet to move away from the centralized blog(s; no reason others couldn't advertise their own apis to the aggregates; twitter included!) and on to their own servers.

So yeah! I see some value there, at least. An 'on-ramp to self publishing', as it were. Without the ever-present threat that your host can de-platform you (without recourse).

I'm not super familiar with Planet and know it's totally different, but this sort of reminds me of Google Reader. I've seen others replicate its newsreader UI, but never the community.