The pitch from the current owners of the Read/Write website sounds a bit like a public radio pledge drive. Give us money so we can report the news. The twist is they have the name of a blog from the early days of the blogosphere. One with an expansive name. So they say let us be that blog again. But they won't, they can't. Because they aren't Richard MacManus, the guy who started R/W, and it's not 2003. And even more important, they are promising a largely one-way web, doing basically the same thing that the other tech news sites do, with the twist that instead of advertising, they are reader-supported.

What would be really revolutionary is if they lived up to the Read/Write name, and created a website where the readers created the news and the editorial people organized it and made it easier to follow.

I would start with a river of course, of the blogs they read. People and products they follow. That way we'd be able to get a clear picture up front of what makes them different from other San Francisco-based tech pubs.

If you want money to reinvigorate blogging then do something new, and exciting, and has the potential to deliver information flows that don't currently exist, and are more relevant to users.

The real promise of the early days of Read/Write was that the future would be different from the past. Looking back to those days is not the way to get to the future. For that you have to push the envelope further out from where it was 12 years ago.