So, while we're doing some redesigning on the new site, lemme 'splain what this new blog is all about.

No doubt that blogging is a major phenomenon of the aughties, if not the thing that most changed modern media in the past decade or so.

But, I think that the blog has actually been a big setback for the distribution of information. There. I said it. (Looks skyward for expected lightning bolt. None comes.)

What is important, and good, about blogging is that it made it easy for more people to publish more information more frequently. It lowered the barrier of entry into the publishing business to near-zero. And that's mostly A Good Thing.

However, because we humans tend to be highly suggestive sheeple, it meant that everyone, even those who should have known better, jumped into a specific format with both feet, regardless of what kind of information they had.

The trouble is that a blog is rarely the best format in which to disseminate information. Anything that is structured data certainly does better elsewhere. And if you are interested in a topic rather than a specific author and you lack the expertise or patience to roll your own feed, a blog can waste your time out of proportion to the value of the information you find.

Here's an example of that. Our friends at the DMN have started spinning out blogs faster than we can keep track of them. Their shopping blog, for instance, sounds like a great idea: Let me know about special sales and deals around town, as well as cool local products.

The trouble is that I'm not a "shopper," at least at the professional level. But I am a cheapskate. So I want to know where to get stuff cheap, but I'm not going to read a blog every day for perishable information on sales.

We decided to attack the same problem the way we attack most problems: With a database. We're still tweaking it, but I find this format far more useful than a blog, even if the data is the same.

There's lots of other examples of this, but the biggest one for us comes in the categorization and targeting of stories. Every time our users read, we're going to learn something about their interests, and then start feeding back more of the same. That requires structured data, which our blogs don't provide.

And, frankly, only a few people are interested in reading my blather (or Alan's or Blair's) specifically -- You are interested in some topics we write about, and not others.

So we decided that even though we're going to use the same open voice we use in our blogs throughout the site, most of those posts would work better in the story format. The same logic follows for folks who contribute content to the site, but with an added reason: We have lots of people who contribute content here and there, but not with the frequency expected of a blog.

In fact, we almost decided to not have any blogs. But then we realized that there are times that we want to talk about random stuff that defies local categorization. And then there is that Peg-specific navel-gazing that I'm particularly wont to do.

So, we're merging together into one blog, for just those purposes. The archives of our old blogs remain.

And for the record, "Square Pegs" is currently winning the naming race.

So now will local media stop referring to us as "a blog?"