Yes, readers can get used to reading content wherever it appears. My sense is that RSS readers haven’t quite figured it out yet but will soon enough in some way. Why, for instance, must clicking a link from one blog post to another take us outside the reader to the actual page of the other? Why can’t the RSS reader grab that post and let us stay conveniently where we want? The killer reader would be able to monetize NYT content better than the NYT could alone, keeping (most of) the difference but making the NYT (better than) whole.

User-generated content will blur the line between readers and writers. It will for the simple reason that very many of us are both readers and writers and find it more efficient to do our reading and writing in one place rather than many. That’s not an argument that one winner will take all; it’s just a prediction that users will tend to be attracted to sites and services that simplify their lives by letting them do more with less.

I do not believe that the NYT or any other serious media company would do well to try to be a “professional editor-in-chief of a sprawling graph of writers and amateur editors.” There will be too much content. Much of it will be simply crummy stuff, but it will be impossible to discern what’s crummy and what’s simply part of a private conversation held in public. Either way, there’s little use in sifting through it manually, from a central place of authority.

To the extent that sites or service that present professional and amateur content together emerge and become successful, they will do so only after they figure out a way to give users simple, intuitive, and powerful filters. We will tolerate only the writing we love. And helping us do that is a job to distribute across very large groups of users empowered by tools far more subtle than the current state of search, acting mostly self-interestedly, sifting, sorting, sharing, choosing by facets, connected to one another asymmetrically, mostly pulling not pushing. The NYT might be just one of those users, or its writers and editors may all be users themselves. Some implementation of tunkrank will help, I’m sure.