Shelly Powers decries the aggregator, as it stands between the reader and the design of a site. I can't find a better way than this to say it: I don't really care about site design. I seriously doubt that it matters that much to anyone. Shelly thinks that aggregators hurt the spread of community by isolating us from the blogroll; heck, when was the last time anyone's was actually updated? I go months without thinking about it.

Consider: before the web, there were bulletin boards. They were isolated by telephone number, limited by available modems/lines, and text only. And yet, huge communities started there. In its time, USENET had (and still has, actually) a large community - and that's all text as well. If people like what you write, they'll come back. If you tell them (by linking) who else is worth reading, they'll follow. The color styles and pictures in the browser are nice, but they're secondary. If the text isn't worth bothering with, nothing else matters.

Update: Jeneane Sessum doesn't get it either. I read the content, not the pictures. Comments can be supported via the Comment API, which most aggregators support (sadly, few feeds actually offer it). I can "walk around" the part of the blogosphere I am interested in a lot faster with an aggregator than I can with a mile long bookmark list.