Meandering about from Richard MacManus's strategizing about e-books, I chanced upon Erik Benson's discussion of why he gets more mileage out of LiveJournal, then broadcast publishing. SixApart's keynote for Blogtalk 2.0 touched upon this as well. There's a place, even big demand, for small scale communication tools. LiveJournal deliberately focuses on that realm and has built up a huge following.
Benson does pine for a more integrated toolbox, but I think focused tools, supporting narrow but universal interconnections, are the way to go. All the buckets Benson dumps content into, except for his paper notebook, can support webfeeds out and in. Add an integration toolbox, my mythical Emacs of aggregation, and the right tool for him could be built.
Webfeeds, UNIX pipes for Web 2.0?