Library clips

Back to reading lists.

Feedster has just released their new Top 500 blogs/feeds, and these are all grouped into tags, thankgod for that, as the list is too long to go through a page at a time, browsing by tag is more targeted to my needs…actually there is also a summary version…Feedster have applied the initial tags, but as you will see next to each entry there is a link for users to tag these blogs.

I’d also like to search by title field for quicker findability.

They also supply an OPML file for all 500 blogs, this would be a heavy load into your RSS Reader…maybe you can limit this by changing the value of the 500 in the URL.

Anyway why not offer an OPML file for each tag…imagine when reading lists (dynamic OPML) are the norm, you could subscibe to the URL of an OPML file of user defined topics of the most linked to (talked about) blogs.
Since Feedster Top500 is based on popularity, blogs would drop in and out of each tag each minute/hour, and you would always be subscribed to the hottest stuff from your favourite user topic as your OPML file is not static, it flows with the changes.

I imagined that Technorati could have OPML files for each Blog Finder topic, the difference is these topics are author-defined and the OPML file would be more stable as blogs wouldn’t be neccessarily deleted unless the author manually took their blog out of a topic, you would get blogs being added everyday, but this list wouldn’t be as volatile as a list decided on incoming links, which is constantly changing with every movement within the blogosphere.

Technorati Top 100 doesn’t have tags or an OPML file, but it would be a good idea, they could use the author-defined tags at least from their BlogFinder, I mean the information is sitting there anyway…then just add an OPML file to each tag.
Actually this would depend if every blog within the Top 100 was listed in Technorati Blog Finder, if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t have a topic/s.

PubSub has released house edited lists, instead of having a Top 100, they have collated some blogs into topics, and then these blogs compete for positioning based on their popularity (not sure if the list is a closed set of blogs or if they have categorised all the library related blogs in their database, if so you might see new blogs appear on the list)…also not sure how they went about categorising blogs.
The OPML file for this blog would be similar to a tag OPML file in the Feedster Top500.

Imagine if Bloglines had a robust search engine and had something like this, they could also offer popularity for each feed according to reading behaviour of users, so ranking would not only be based on incoming links, but also from density of readership, or offer 2 separate lists.

Rojo could offer an OPML file for feeds by user-defined tags ranked on user reading behaviour, as they already have tags for feeds.
Similar to the Technorati BlogFinder example above, these OPML lists won’t be as volatile as popularity OPML lists (based on incoming links) as once you have tagged a feed in your RSS reader you aren’t really going to move it to another tag, or apply a new tag to an existing feed that often…more often you will see new feeds in tags as people add them to their readers, or feeds dropped from tags as users drop them from their readers (in saying this if one person drops a tag from their reader, it doesn’t mean it will disappear from that tag as another user may have tagged the same feed with the same tag).

So even though you won’t see blogs coming and going from each tag OPML file as often as one based on incoming links, you will see them ranked higher in the list due to the aggregated reading behaviour of all Rojo users (visits, clicks, flagging, maybe even ratings).

We tag the blogs in the top100 lists
We tag the blogs in the RSS readers
Ranking is based on our reading behaviour
Ranking is based on our ratings
Ranking is based on us linking to people
We make the blog posts