JoeUser.com is a business.
I choose articles to feature based on what I believe is of interest to other people. I wrote an article about Spyware and how it's changing the course of the Internet. It only has a few responses to it but it has brought a great deal of traffic to this site.
By contrast, a personal journal talking about what they ate for lunch or who they had an argument with is not going to be of much interest to the wider audience. As a result, I don't tend to pick those.
I don't claim to be unbiased. But I do claim to be fairly qualified in knowing what kinds of topics are of interest to the wider audience. I don't make any bones about what I choose. I am choosing articles that I think will lead to JoeUser.com becoming more popular. Given that this site hasn't even been officially announced but is already one of the most popular blog sites on the Internet, I think I can be cut a little slack on knowing what I'm doing.
The only recent Muggaz article that I might have featured would have been the one on role models but I read that one after it was too late to feature it for that day. There are no other community blog sites on the Internet designed as JoeUser is. You do not have to be featured on the home page in order for your article to become popular. Users could go out and promote their articles elsewhere for instance and gain points that way. Right now I could write an article and not feature it and it would still become one of the most popular articles on this site because I try to write articles that interest both myself and other readers.
As someone else said, going by # of comments is a ridiculous measurement. Admins know precisely how many unique people have read a given article. General interest articles are of much greater interest than ones about one's cat or how they got drunk last night or how depressed they are or whatever.
