Seb Paquet has a post at Many to Many about the role that webloggers can play as embedded reporters within online communities: do online communities need reporters?
"For some time I�ve been thinking that wiki communities might also benefit from having a journalist or two to help others make sense of what�s happening globally. An RSS feed of recent changes just isn�t meaningful enough. Back when Wikipedia was starting out, I recall founder Larry Sanger used to write weekly reports on what had been going on in the �pedia and I found that useful. Howard Rheingold�s Brainstorms community does have an internal volunteer group-edited newsletter called �the Brainstorms Scoop�, which helps locate the interesting recent action in the huge volume of messages that the community produces."
I think there's also scope for mixing mailing lists and blogs - pulling out threads to a blog so they gain more coherence and can be linked externally. I suggested this recently on a community informatics list and got some support. One group pointed out the need for some editorialising (reporting), another got fired up about the technology. The usual thing happened. A techie put up a blog..."come on in, let get started". Nice interface, but not much has happened. It needs leadership, agreement on who does the work, and a volunteer(s). Now, how many messages will it take to agree that...