What Happened to the Cooperative Digest?

The Cooperative Digest is dead, long live developer.* Blogs. I recently made the decision to eliminate the idea of the developer.* Cooperative Digest, with it's focus on "community-based blogging," and change to simply, developer.* Blogs. What's the difference?

I have come to the conclusion the community-based blogging works best when it comes from an already established community. I don't think that trying the reverse--that is, trying to use the blogging platform as the means to build a community, was necessarily the best idea.

The other challenge the Cooperative Digest created for me personally was it became an additional editorial burden. The irony was that this prevented me from focusing on my own writing, and building my own identity as an author, via my blog. By changing developer.* Blogs to a loose federation of bloggers, instead of a group of people contributing to the same "publication," a weight is lifted for me.

The main problem, I decided, with the conception of the Cooperative Digest was that blogging is a highly personal and ego-driven medium. Blogs don't become popular, bloggers do. So I decided the best thing to do was to change the developer.* blogging platform to focus more on individual bloggers. That is, we will still host blogs, and I hope that lots of smart people will continue to blog on the developer.* site, but the focus has changed.

As I write this, it is unclear exactly what form specific site design changes will take in the near future. I hope at least one thing is clear: I am definitely not trying to chase anyone away. On the contrary, I hope to make this an even better place for writing and reading blogs.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. What would improve developer.* Blogs?

Dan