Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

Chris Garrett has a post where he explains the value of content, syndication, and community:

There are three critical aspects that make a blog great. Lose any one aspect and you have made it so much harder to be a success. The simple truth is without my reader community a massive part of my blog would be lost. Without comments blogs are sadly lacking. I need you! This post explains the three critical components of a successful blog - my “Three Dimensions” of blogging.

1. The First Dimension: Content - A blog should be constantly updated. The first dimension is the stickiness of fresh news and articles. Any website can be routinely added to but this is more true of blogs. It is expected of a blog that it will be added to. Another aspect of this dimension is the archive. If people like what they see when they first visit they can drill back to your older stuff.
2. The Second Dimension: Syndication - Traditional websites might have a newsletter attached to attract people back but subscriptions are part and parcel of blogs. Readers expect to be able to read the blog without actually visiting. Further to this, syndication is perhaps a way blogging will evolve in future with mashups, new tools and advancements in widgets. The main difference between a newsletter and syndication is emails are still on the creators timing rather than the readers. As with other media, people want their content on their own schedule. We don’t like having to march to the beat of anothers drum. We time-shift. Syndication allows us to time-shift blogs. It is not enough to just make syndication available, people have to use it and enjoy using it. Your feed is not an after-thought, it is the engine of your blog.
3. The Third Dimension: Conversation - Without community your site is still a blog, but it is a blog without a soul. One of the huge benefits of blogs is you can converse with the content creator. In other media this opportunity is either absent or highly constrained (letter to the editor, phone-ins, nothing compares). This community adds to the original ideas of the blogger in so many ways it fuels the blog much more than the blogger alone can manage. It is not just your own community either, the conversation takes place across blogs and between blogs. Again, as with Syndication, the content and venue are not tied together. Even blogs without comments enabled still have to take part in the conversation.

This is not a 1+1+1=3 equation. The whole is way more than the sum of the parts. Each dimension doesn’t just add to the others; add a dimension that is missing and see the benefits multiply.

I must say that I agree with the points about comments. When I moved my blog this past weekend, somehow the comments vanished. So listen up folks, Hidden Dragon needs your comments!