That doesn't even begin to solve the problem. It helps new user onboarding, not old content discovery. "Getting started" can fit, what, at a stretch, a dozen posts. A reasonably old, quality blog will have many dozen posts which are worth bringing forward. And a blog with links, like swombat.com or daringfireball.net, will have many more.
I wonder how much would be helped if you thought intentionally thought about writing your blog as essays to be collected in a book. (A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other various material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side)
Growing up, I used to love reading Mike Royko. He was sharp, and funny, and told the greatest stories in his newspaper column (A newspaper is a regularly scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint.)
And his columns (A column is a recurring piece or article in a newspaper, magazine or other publication. Columns are written by columnists.)
And then once a year, once every couple of years or so, he would collect his newspaper columns into a book.
And we would all go and buy his book.
At the beginning of blogging, I used to follow some bloggers that I thought were funny, and I would suggest they write their blogs in a way that would allow the blog to be collected into a book.
I thought by giving up a bit of the immediacy, by developing recurring characters (http://www.amazon.com/Slats-Grobnik-some-other-friends/dp/05...) that it would actually make their blogs more interesting, and give them a longer lasting character, than just a blog post that is mostly disappeared 10 posts later.
Sadly, Jeff Jarvis and others also thought of this, and then added cement galoshes to it by naming it a "blook". And that was the end of that.
But I hear what you are saying. Blogs are nice in that like a magazine they do emphasize content about a current event. Books are nice in that their organization adds a great deal of value to an otherwise random collection of unconnected essays. In that way, a book is an argument, (a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition)
Blogs provide value to a socially connected world of twitter driven ADHD fanatics each seeking out the next shiny shiny source of poutrage.
But there has to be a more useful organization than just blogs, a calendar, and a google.
Perhaps if you thought about it as a book ahead of time, you could start out with a table of contents and a thesis, and use that mashed in with today's latest current event to focus what you blog about. And that would help you keep track and link from one post to another the way jwz does, or philg, or pg, or others.
I think the solution is a combination of tactics. A curated "getting started" or "best of" list is a good way to get eyes on some of the best posts that are representative of the blog. Make good use of categories and tags, and use lists of related posts to make navigation between similar posts less painful. On my blog (http://grokcode.com), I also have a prominent "popular today" section on the homepage so people can see which posts are getting the most traffic at the moment (these are rarely the newest posts). http://www.alistapart.com/ has a curated "editor's choice" section on the homepage that is frequently updated and help draw attention to great content from the archives.
Also, the standard blog format uses entire posts on the homepage and archive pages, but everything is so much cleaner and easier to navigate if only post summaries appear on those pages.
But nobody uses frontpages for content discovery. The front page of a blog is good for just two questions:
a) For new users: is this site any good?
b) For existing users (who don't grok RSS, sigh): is there anything new?
You can try to do more. Lots of us have category pages[1]. But invariably they get browsed by initial visitors so they fall into category a above.
Perhaps what you're saying is that every website needs a channel to bring visitors back. And twitter may well be that channel. But bricestacey is right that the frontpage is all about user onboarding simply because nobody uses it for content discovery.
Nobody uses front pages for content discovery because the front pages rarely present the right interface or content for that. Maybe that can change...
I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your content short. It's the written equivalent of a news channel, instead of being the evolution of the book. I'm hoping we can do better.
"I think that merely serving current/new users in this way is selling your content short."
I'm not convinced that's true. The big limitation of the frontpage is that there's no way to remind people to return to it. Without that you'll only get current/new users.
I totally agree we need a solution for content discovery. Like many others I took my stab at building one (http://readwarp.com) I'm just not convinced that the frontpage is the place for it.
Bloggers should think of themselves as historians, taking their and others' content and putting it in a new context down the line when people have forgotten about it.
