This is why bloggers add table of contents or getting started pages.
a) For new users: is this site any good?
b) For existing users (who don't grok RSS, sigh): is there anything new?
You can try to do more. Lots of us have category pages[1]. But invariably they get browsed by initial visitors so they fall into category a above.
Perhaps what you're saying is that every website needs a channel to bring visitors back. And twitter may well be that channel. But bricestacey is right that the frontpage is all about user onboarding simply because nobody uses it for content discovery.
[1] Including myself: http://akkartik.name
I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your content short. It's the written equivalent of a news channel, instead of being the evolution of the book. I'm hoping we can do better.
I'm not convinced that's true. The big limitation of the frontpage is that there's no way to remind people to return to it. Without that you'll only get current/new users.
I totally agree we need a solution for content discovery. Like many others I took my stab at building one (http://readwarp.com) I'm just not convinced that the frontpage is the place for it.
Also, the standard blog format uses entire posts on the homepage and archive pages, but everything is so much cleaner and easier to navigate if only post summaries appear on those pages.
Growing up, I used to love reading Mike Royko. He was sharp, and funny, and told the greatest stories in his newspaper column (A newspaper is a regularly scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint.)
And his columns (A column is a recurring piece or article in a newspaper, magazine or other publication. Columns are written by columnists.)
And then once a year, once every couple of years or so, he would collect his newspaper columns into a book.
And we would all go and buy his book.
At the beginning of blogging, I used to follow some bloggers that I thought were funny, and I would suggest they write their blogs in a way that would allow the blog to be collected into a book.
I thought by giving up a bit of the immediacy, by developing recurring characters (http://www.amazon.com/Slats-Grobnik-some-other-friends/dp/05...) that it would actually make their blogs more interesting, and give them a longer lasting character, than just a blog post that is mostly disappeared 10 posts later.
Sadly, Jeff Jarvis and others also thought of this, and then added cement galoshes to it by naming it a "blook". And that was the end of that.
But I hear what you are saying. Blogs are nice in that like a magazine they do emphasize content about a current event. Books are nice in that their organization adds a great deal of value to an otherwise random collection of unconnected essays. In that way, a book is an argument, (a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition)
Blogs provide value to a socially connected world of twitter driven ADHD fanatics each seeking out the next shiny shiny source of poutrage.
But there has to be a more useful organization than just blogs, a calendar, and a google.
Perhaps if you thought about it as a book ahead of time, you could start out with a table of contents and a thesis, and use that mashed in with today's latest current event to focus what you blog about. And that would help you keep track and link from one post to another the way jwz does, or philg, or pg, or others.
Bloggers should think of themselves as historians, taking their and others' content and putting it in a new context down the line when people have forgotten about it.