Does it matter?
It's not exactly true that a blog is as a blog does. There seem to be some identifying characteristics that let us spot one, to distinguish it from, well, from any regular web site (if there really is such as thing). Some of these characteristics are in the layout, which is of course due to the fact that from the outset blogs were intended to be easy to set up and maintain. But as the technical possibilities expanded, so did the layout, and today's blogs can be very distinctive, and perhaps even hard categorize as blogs. Arts and Letters Daily doesn't proclaim BLOG from its layout, but its one-sentence blurbs on the materials to which it links is certainly blog-like, as is, of course, the fact that what it does is basically invite you to go elsewhere to find something to read.
On the other hand, we expect to find personal commentary in a blog, and AL Daily rather purposefully steers clear of that. It's as though we're not reading what one particular person finds worth reading, but what any broad-minded person, with unlimited time and resources, would find worth reading. There's something strangely unblog-like about that.
AL Daily lists a number of blogs on its site. These are probably sources for many of the articles that ultimately get recommended. This is, among other things, a way of giving credit where credit is due, and of allowing me to check out the sources and perhaps discover that I want to get my recommendations from some other source. I have no way of really knowing if those sources are the first source, or whether they also found links on other blogs. But frankly, not only doesn't it matter, but (for me at least) I prefer not to know. What's good about AL Daily is precisely the fact that it's a digest that takes care of plowing through other sources for me. In this particular case I prefer being high up on the food chain.
Go to: When do you get your work done?, or
Go to: I have dabbled a bit, or
Go to: The ethos of blog.