Library clips

PubSub has released community lists which are basically blog topic portals…Steven Cohen from Library Stuff has made one for library enthusiasts called The Librarian List.

So what you get is a human edited list of library feeds ranked by PubSub’s LinkRank.

The sidebar has a glimpse of the latest posts from the whole list, and you can do this to as they offer a mega-spliced feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS reader or even re-syndicate to the sidebar of your blog.
(Be aware that posts from your favourite blog may cease to exist if they are bumped off the list, ie. the spliced feed is dynamic)

Also on offer is an OPML file of the list, which is basically an alternative to the spliced feed, the OPML enables you to import all these individual feeds into your RSS reader in one go…so instead of reading all the content from one feed, you are reading the content from all the individual feeds.

It doesn’t matter when you subscribe to the spliced feed, as the content will always reflect the latest on the PubSub Librarian List page, but if you subscribe to the OPML file today, it may include different feeds than the OPML file tommorrow…why?…a blog may be bumped off the list, or one may be added to the list, so the OPML file is not dynamic in retrospect.

NOTE: it is dynamic in that the OPML file lives at a URL that always reflects the latest blogs on the list, but it isn’t dynamic in the way of just having to subscribe to the list only once.
In saying this, if a blog is bumped off the list, and you imported the OPML file yesterday, it doesn’t mean that that feed will disappear from your RSS reader, you still have to re-subscribe to the new feeds added to the list, and manually delete feeds dropped from the list.

So you don’t want to have to delete all those feeds from the original OPML import and re-subscribe to the OPML file on a daily basis, that’s crazy.
What could happen is that you could subscribe to an RSS feed of the OPML file itself, like Superfan for Bloglines.
This way when a feed/s is added or deleted from an OPML file you have imported in the past you will be notified of the name of that feed/s, and then you can manually delete or add it in your RSS reader.

But what about going a step further from just notifying you of the latest additions/deletions in the list, and actually deleting or adding a feed magically in your RSS reader…this way you don’t have to do it, it happens dynamically
…or maybe the feed stays in your RSS reader but it isn’t polled anymore, but then that doesn’t explain how feeds will be added (magically appear in your RSS reader), and it will leave stale feeds in your RSS reader anyway.
See an earlier post [section heading OPML reading lists (OPML feed)].

Another way to find topic blogs is to search Technorati Blog Finder (these are user defined, unlike PubSub), apparently Technorati are going to perhaps reinvent this service into reading lists as well.

So for now these OPML files can be called “Reading Lists”, but in the future we hope to see “Dynamic Reading Lists”…an older TechCrunch post has more.

Related post:
OPML Manager on the OPML train

[via Techcrunch]