Jeneane at Allied has a great post about how aggregators are packagers for lazy people that Shelly at Burning Bird picks up.
Short version: Blogs--along with blogrolls and comments--are a community ecosystem and we need them.
J: "We have to get out and WALK the blog neighborhood. Everyone reading this post, please make sure that you have a blogroll. Sure, I can't tell you what to do, but Blogrolls are the antidote to RSS and aggregators."
S: "Communities, friendships, a sense of companionship and sharing canÂ't be made or broken through the use of tools. If anything, when we become friends through our online associations, we have done something extraordinary–we have reached beyond the limits of technology and created something human, and real."

Shelly then says that these online communities are fragile--and she's right--but they are also amazingly powerful--and can move into the real world and become strong ties.
For many bloggers, blogs become connectors for real-world relationship and on-going discourse--something that is in a different bucket than a hunger for news--and more connection-focused than content focused.