The huge email list that I wish someone culled a weekly digest from is arborparents - that group generates so much traffic that’s relevant that you could create news from it. (and indeed I know it’s one of the attention streams that feeds into the Observer).

Or: the weblog is a machine.

After this post, I had a nice conversation with somebody from one of the projects I wrote about; seems like this is definitely the challenge for them. Fortunately, they’re sitting on enough (not a huge amount, but enough) excellent content to make some pretty nicely leveraged improvements.

The challenge for any Arbor Update / Arborwiki / (Yspi)wiki / DowntownYpsi / Ron Suarez ghostwiki wikiwikicobweb city council stuff / Critical Moment / etc. integrations is that I don’t see that much overlap in the readerships, at this point. None of them are exactly thriving, either (with the notable exception of Critical Moment + Critical Bloggers).

An opportunity I definitely see is for somebody to write focused “pulse of the blogosphere” commentary drawing from all of the above. Here’s what’s happening this week, and here’s what a sort of diffuse yet geographically linked set of people are saying about it. As a random example, Ed Vielmetti has been surfacing a lot of great stuff about dueling realtors (worse than dueling banjos) in the Pfizer Pfired aftermath.

Somebody who has the attention stream to slog through all this stuff and do some high-level linking and thinking could produce a really great digest.

But, I’m not that somebody — at least not this year.