What would you do?

I have been thinking about this for a while now, and was hopping I could get some feed back from you guys. As you may have seen in my last blog post, the rating system has its problems. Even beyond that though, it is hard for members to really discover new blogs.

As of now, you can click on a forum avatar, check the top 25, or the latest 25. While these are all good ways to check out new blogs, most people only rely on the top 4 and only the top 4 when it comes to reading new blogs. Im not sure why this is, but it just is.

So now I have to pose the questions of how we can make it better.

1) What should the top 4 be based on? Votes? Views? Mod rated? Admin rated? How would you go about choosing the best 4 for any given time and why?

2) How would you go about discovering new blogs? At this point you have the blog area that can be accessed at any time via the Vertical BLOGS button on the top of every page. Is there a better way to read someones blog? Most complain that their blog is pushed off the top 4 too fast, but that doesn't mean they are gone from the latest 25. Then again, no one seems to be interested in that. Ideas?

Now, before you answer just remember this. Im not going to be redesigning the site just to fit blogs. Many people often say, just ad more rows of people to the blog area. There is a reason it is only the top 4 and rebuilding the site would only make us run into more design issues. So baring that in mind, what would you do? How do you think it should be rated, shown, or tweaked?