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Isam had a nice post regarding the new revisit of JordanPlanet. So this is my comments to his post, which did not make it there, maybe it is too lengthy. Anyway…

The fact that you are using Drupal gives you a powerful tool in hand, yet it all depends on the mission of JP.
For example, if the mission is to keep it as a reblog of Jordanian Bloggers, then I suggest two things:
1. Reduce the Cron job intervals so that it is updated with latest posts as soon as they are published on the original blog.
2. Instead of aggregating the complete post, aggregate only the headlines.
3. You can forget about Drupal and use something else

However, as you said, automated aggregator (auto reblog) is not always a good idea, specially when you think of it as warehouse of all what is posted around the Jordanian Blogs. In that case, you can’t do anything but accepting the fact that that’s what the blogger have to say in his blog. On the other hand, moderated reblog is the solution. But then you may lose the interest of some bloggers coz everyone would like to see his posts reblogged somewhere, here in JP.

Therefore, I believe mission has to be first established and published, then everyone will have to just adhere to that mission. I have two examples which might help. My AraBlog reBlog (http://arablog.net) is a one-man-show, it only reflects what I see appropriate to publish and what not to. On the other hand, when Mahmood and I stared building http://BahrainBlogs.com we first formed a founding committee who toke the initiative to put together the mission and how we see it should be running. Although bahrainBlogs is not an aggregator, however members of that group can post anything there (related to Bahrain), but only certain posts can make it to the front page, and the rest will just show at the top of the page as a headline which will take them to the full post. So you see we are using a rating system, when the rating reach some level, the post get pushed to the front page.

Having said all this, I think mission should be first stated, then you can take it from there. If the mission is to have it as aggregator, then maybe it should aggregate the headlines only. I would prefer someone reading the full post on my blog rather than at JP, not that I don’t like JP, I love it, but I like my readers to be in my atmosphere and surrounding, yet discover more about the blog, same maybe applies to everyone.

What else?… I had something more but I forgot now, maybe later