Seth Dillingham writes about a conversation he had with Jon Udell weblogs and RSS feeds about “the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they’re stored on.)”
But what really caught my attention was Seth’s take on the need (my word, not his) for weblogs having multiple RSS feeds. Seth wrote,
Lots of weblogs now provide multiple RSS feeds (RSS is a syndication format.) Unless your entire weblog is devoted to a specific subject, and you never stray from that subject, you might want to belong to more than one community. TruerWords, for example, could provide RSS feeds for posts realted to Conversant, Birmans, or digital photography. Those feeds would be picked up by different communities, and it wouldn’t matter that my site isn’t actually hosted by any of them.
This is something I have been working at in my spare time. Frankly, Conversant makes it easy to set up RSS feeds for distinct categories, the real issue is that most of the people I talk to have never heard of RSS.
But as an example, I have a topical faq about animal rights that automatically categorizes the thousand or so articles I’ve written about animal rights into hundreds of categories. The obvious next step is to create topical RSS feeds. For example, a lot of people just want to track what PETA is doing. So I have a PETA RSS feed that shows the last 15 stories I’ve written that are about PETA.
It would take only a couple hours to create RSS feeds for the other 300 or so topics, so people who want to track animal rights terrorism or maybe the Humane Society of the United States could do that too.
Seth’s and Jon’s ideas about a meta-layer that brings together multiple such feeds is the obvious next step. For example, a lot of the warblogs include discussions and critiques of Noam Chomsky. A couple weeks ago there was discussion about starting a multi-editor blog just devoted to dissing Chomsky.
But that’s sort of hard to sustain on such a narrow topic. A much better solution would be for warbloggers who write about Chomsky occasionally to offer an RSS feed of just those stories and then use something like Seth is talking about to bring them together.
The major obstacle to this, of course, is that the number of bloggers who are attaching any sort of metadata to their posts is almost nil. I’ve seen more of it than in the past, since Radio and Movable Type support categorization systems (though neither seems to have the flexibility that Conversant does), but most of the blogs I read are done in Blogger and have no categorization at all (which is extremely frustrating as a user. Many times I visit a site and would like to see all the posts a person has written about Noam Chomsky, but that is very difficult without metadata).