In response to your question, where do I think I'm going with all this. I'll try to give you a few more thoughts ranging from a couple of details to the wildly abstract. So it best belongs under the "musings" category.

I really like all the stuff you're posting. It's exactly the sort of experimental mix I'd hoped you'd put together. It's got lots of variety. Some headlines, when they've got serious implications, like the withdrawal of NGOs from Iraq. The quotes on democracy both make a great set of points and are useful to have stuffed away in the "filing cabinet." And the set of pieces that ask fundamental questions on Iraq are excellent and deserve some followup, as I mentioned I'd give on the Posner piece.

I don't have a well-developed mental picture of the site. I see my main task for the next few weeks to put up lots of different types of things, seeing what works, do we need to adjust the navigation, the categories (e.g., more detailed, less detailed, fewer "themes" more "nouns"), how useful to have web pages to go along with some of the themes, do we have "a" voice, several depending on either topic or type of entry?

Your points about making the visuals a bit more lively on the front page is certainly well taken. The header panel is too heavy -- maybe a mildly textured (not busy). (I'm a clean geometry, not a floral, sort of gel.) The sidebar navigation components (themes and the recent articles/comments) take up quite a lot of space when the page first opens. If we have expandable components in the sidebars, that could leave some space for a "book corner" set of thumbnails. Or a photo or two of a landscape, or city scene or piece of art from a country that we've got a lot of stuff on that week.

Though I don't have a clear "picture," I guess I do have a blurred "vision" -- a combination of front pages that show a stream of interesting topics, so people have a reason to "drop by." Some of which may get a conversation going. And a whole series of places to browse, where there are both original items (including some old posts with good conversations attached) and lots of interesting papers, articles, books, links, that have been selected for their interest and have been somewhat organized and digested.

The thing I find missing in lots of internet browsing, especially in blogs, is the library "stack search" or browsing through the shelves of a good bookstore. Google searching is great -- an electronic card catalog on steroids -- but you sort of have to know what's out there, unless you're looking for something quite specific. So I'd like to create the feel of wandering through the shelves, as well as more timely narratives and conversations. (BTW, I assume that an advantage of putting resources that have some shelf life as webpages on the site, rather than just provide links to them, is they become text searchable with the site-search function. Or am I confused.)

It may be too ambitious to combine all those features. But I'd like to give it a try, since it seems to be a niche that's not really covered yet. For awhile DeLong would post book reviews, which were terrific, but that seems to have gone by the boards. About the best you get from the academic sites like Juan Cole, or even Marginal Revolution, is a couple of course syllabi and a list of their own writings. The think tanks and academic departments have "agendas" (even if those are only to defend internal bureaucratic stovepipes or territorial imperatives) in what they collect and how they present the material. And often they don't really take advantage of the cross-linkages that hyperlinks could give them.

The ultimate goal, I think, is your notion of somehow connecting the academics and journalists through the blogging world's ability to drill down and make linkages. That would be starting to push the envelope on the whole unsatisfactory epistemological framework we're trapped in right now.

This is a topic for a number of other essays, but I do hope it will become a recurring theme for blogging and this little experiment. It's what I call info-napsterization, which goes beyond just the journalism vs blogging or MSM vs new media discussions. This is the thinking behind the "global trend" I've labelled "disintermediation/napsterization." It's a phenomenon that extends from the financial sector through markets for other "information products", whether music, film, literature, ideas and opinion, news, research data, and scientific knowledge. Some of the features in the non-entertainment areas:

• Knowledge production has become either too specialized (e,g, academia) or too "infotainment" because the production incentives have become totally screwed up, and the form and level of compensation for a producer has become increasingly uncertain.
• Business models built on "open source" are starting to suggest another set of structural drivers for rewards and competition, but it's not clear where they're taking us.
• Money is not the only currency of information in the markets for producing and distributing information. The "power structure" of information production and distribution is increasingly fluid. So the non-profit-incentives are working differently but not yet in a clearly discernible fashion.
• Distribution channels are in the midst of revolution -- becoming ever more fragmented and ever more integrated at the same time.
• The "validation" or "creditworthiness" function of the mainstream media and other intermediaries is rapidly disappearing -- as it did for the money center banks vis a vis the corporate debt markets and for the home town S"&"Ls vis a vis the credit scoring industry.
• At some point, however, some form of validation or credential service has to emerge -- otherwise the transaction costs and information asymmetries of ascertaining the credibility (or as Fukuyama would emphasize the trustworthiness) of each new information source is simply too high. We certainly have found in the blogging world that some of the most viewed aren't necessarily the most reliable -- so far the market hasn't provided sufficient discipline.

To this list of changes and challenges, I'd add the notable absence to date of hands-on experts. They aren't "credentialed" in the same way as academics and journalists, but they have as much value to add when it comes to (1) producing knowledge and, perhaps more important (2) knowing how to apply knowledge in new and different circumstances. If the distribution mechanisms and economics change, then knowledge producers who have not heretofore been engaged in distribution may have new incentives, and access to lower cost distribution, making it possible for them to become important figures in the distribution process.

These factors -- and the grand objective of digging and connecting -- should be in the back of our minds, though I don't think it's possible to go straight for them out of the box. I'm not quite of the "if you build it they will come" school. Instead, build something for a more diverse audience/participants that would eventually serve as a good base for such a product.