Library clips

The other day I posted how Technorati could whip up some Reading Lists.
I think Rojo could do the same for its Top 1oo (most read feeds), but unlike the Top 100 based on Technorati Favourites subscriptions, the Rojo Top 100 feeds is more explicitly based on reading behaviour (this is more accurate because we know people are actually reading the posts from the feeds, not just subscribed to the feeds and never looking at them).

The way Rojo knows that people are reading feeds/posts is if they; collapse/expand a story, flag or save (tag) a story, email or share a story, or simply click on the title…so as we can see we know the feeds are being read because we know the posts are being clicked on, (there is some activity going on)…I guess they also may know we are reading a feed, if we click on it from our subscription pane, but this won’t happen often if you read as a river of news, ie. if you click on the feed tag/folder to read content.

Rojo most read feeds is like a top 100, but the only thing is you can’t see the top feeds (you used to with their Explore page), now you can only see the most read posts via the Today page (formerly the Explore page)…you can also view these top stories by user tags.
So maybe a post only makes it to the “Most read stories” if it has been tagged (saved) by a user, and it’s ranking is based on the rest of the reading behaviour.

This data is culled into a weekly editorial, The Week in Rojo: Top Stories for the week

Now this leads to creating a Grazing List…a list of feeds based on the feed having a post in Rojo’s most read stories…Adam Green (see under the “more” heading) could make one for Rojo as he did for tech.memeorandum.

Just quickly, a Grazing List is a type of Reading List where the feeds are perpetually changing, a way that this can happen is as mentioned above…the feed is included into the Grazing List because one if its posts is popular…in the next hour or next week there will be a whole different bunch of popular posts, therefore a new bunch of feeds in the Grazing List, so the idea is to graze while you can.

In this vein you could create a Grazing List from popular posts in the last hour or week from social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or even sites with voting such as digg.
Keep in mind, a Grazing List would not work in FeedButler, which is a service like digg, where people vote for bookmarks, the only difference is that these bookmarks are not submitted, instead they are generated by the feed set in FeedButler.
As you can then tell the feeds don’t really change, so once you have browsed all the feeds once, then you know all the feeds on offer…I guess it could work as a Grazing List if their feed set was really massive (which it may be), so viewing feeds from popular posts for the hour/week would always showcase feeds you may have not seen before, this would then make it a Grazing List.