Letters to *The Economist*

They are all on a blog now, a very clever idea.  The deeper question is what the equilibrium for an open-source blog looks like, keeping in mind there is some small cost of writing a letter.  And how much does the name of the sponsoring entity — surely The Economist has a premium reputation — affect the quality of that final equilibrium?

How about doing the same but with an Amazon-like rating system, which would rank the posts, putting the most popular ones on top of the page?  Or just hire one smart person to "stack" them in the right order, or in the right categories?

I know that many major media outlets are looking to move into blogging, my kudos to the one which figured out that the readers should be the writers as well.  And they even let them sign their names…