Library clips

When are we going to flourish with Reading Lists?

BlogBridge can make a Reading List within the RSS Reader so can Feedmarker, and a Reading List can be made any number of ways, it’s a bunch of RSS feeds wrapped in OPML, to make it easier for batch loading, but to be a Reading List (dynamic) the OPML must have a URL.

It seems until RSS readers can actually read dynamic OPML files (Reading Lists) we won’t see the creation of Reading Lists in a hurry, BlogBridge seems to be the only RSS Reader that can use Reading Lists, along with the new reader created by Dave Winer.

So an RSS reader can make a Reading List, all the other RSS Readers have to do is create an OPML URL for every folder or tag people use to organise their subscriptions.

You can also make a Reading List with an outlining tool like OPML Manager, where your outline is output into an OPML file that lives at a URL.

You can also make a Reading List of a different kind, imagine if you could select tags in del.icio.us to be part of an OPML file. Well now with the Social Bookmarking RSS Feeds - OPML Generator you can select the RSS feeds of various del.icio.us tags from various users (even from various other bookmarking services) and create an OPML file…the only thing is that once you save this OPML file locally you will have to import it into a tool that enables the OPML file to have a URL, like some of the services mentioned above.

So you could discover different del.icio.us users tags on a topic like “tagging”, and make a topic Reading List…after you have created the OPML file, people can subscribe to it’s URL in a service like BlogBridge…now later on you may discover another user with a great tag related to your topic and add that to the OPML, or you may decide to drop a tag from your OPML, and this will be reflected in whoever is subscribed to your Reading List, so it is always a dynamically current list.
But a Reading List made from bookmark feeds is slightly different than an OPML file made from blog feeds, it’s kind of a topic list with the contents coming from link blogs.

See an earlier post on creating Reading Lists.

Where else can you make a Reading List, so far:

- RSS Reader
- OPML Outliner
- Social bookmarks 3rd party (then host the URL at an OPML Outliner or RSS Reader)

What about a feed folksonomy, like Rojo or RSSor…I guess there is no stopping you using del.icio.us as a feed folksonomy, when you see a blog you like just bookmark the feed page instead of the homepage.

This type of Reading List would be very dynamic in itself as the contents would be changing all the time…if you browse the Rojo feed directory (folksonomy), you can look at a tag which contains all the feeds from all Rojo users that have used that tag, now the feeds in that tag would be changing all the time, as people are adding new ones, or deleting them or moving them to other tags.
If these tags had an OPML URL they would be Reading Lists, and you could subscribe to this URL in an RSS Reader that is equipped to use Reading Lists (such as BlogBridge)…so all I’m saying is that a tag of feeds (with an OPML URL) at the whole community level (all Rojo account - feed folksonomy), compared to the user level (one Rojo account), would be more dynamic as there would be more movement and changes happenning…also it would be a Reading List based on what lots of people think compared to what one person thinks.

Reading List with ranked feeds by popularity

If you follow an earlier post you can take this even a step further, meaning a Reading List can be even more dynamic again, if the feeds within the tag are based on some sort of ranking.

Imagine if the feeds within a Reading List don’t drop in and out according to the owner of the Reading List deleting or adding feeds, but that this happens automatically based on incoming links.

For example take the PubSub Librarian’s List (I’m not sure how this works, but imagine) that every blog in the blogosphere about “Libraries” was tagged with “Library”, and then you made a Top 10 or 20, etc…ie. a list made up of the feeds tagged as libraries that had the most incoming links (hopefully it wouldn’t be incoming links of all time as the top blog may never move even though they haven’t blogged in weeks or months…so to make this current you would have to add an element of decay into the results as PubSub cleverly do).

Now imagine if this list had an OPML file (the Librarian’s List does have an OPML file, but it is not a URL), then people could subscribe to the URL of this OPML Reading List with BlogBridge, and you would find that your feeds in this list would be changing all the time as their existence to being on the list is based on incoming links, so this would be a very “hot” Reading List.

NOTE: I just noticed that you can make a search feed at PubSub just based on the Librarian’s List.

I wonder…

We have established that if feeds are added/deleted from the OPML URL then this will reflect in your RSS Reader…if a Reading List is based on popularity, surely feeds will come and go but they will jostle around positions, would this reflect in your RSS Reader, ie. would the feeds in your Reading List change positions based on the relevance ranking of incoming links. Frequency of polling is also a issue, because the feeds may change positions hundreds of times before your RSS Reader polls the list, but at least any time you open your RSS Reader and view the feeds in your Reading List you will know they are the hottest feeds according to that topic and are always listed with the most popular feed first in the list.

See my post, Hot topic OPML files please! to see this scenario applied to other services such as Feedster and Technorati.

Reading List with ranked feeds by readership

Rojo also has a most read feeds service (this is in contrast to most incoming links), so this could be a Reading List based on most read feeds 9I guess this means most subscribed feeds), even at the tag level…so the popularity is based on readership rather than incoming links…a relevancy based on all these aspects would be exceptional.