Inspired by Dave Winer's Convention Bloggers I built a "River of News" aggregator of UK Political Blogs. I was at the Mashup event last night with Marc Canter on Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.

So anyway. Maintaining UkPoliBlogs is a little time consuming and I get the pccasional complaint about the primitive user interface. It occurred to me that any of the online RSS readers could do something like this. They could allow me to drop in an OPML subscription list and then handle all the heavy lifting of presenting the RSS feeds. Of course this should be a barn raising so that other people could add to the list. We'd then have a number of topic focussed composite News Rivers on niche topics. Perhaps something like a dynamic version of Amazon's Lists. "UK Political Blogs" would be just one list within thousands. Now maybe somebody's already doing this. But a quick scan of Newsgator, Bloglines, My Yahoo didn't turn up anything.

This in turn leads on to a problem I have with all DLAs as they have appeared so far. They're all built round the old Portal idea of a collection of reading matter in one place for one person to read. This is all supported and underpinned by very Web 1.0 ideas of sticky eyeballs, monetizing via advertising and so on. There's nothing especially wrong with this, but I want to invert it. I want to build a big Web 2.0 AboutMe page that is all the content I produce for *other people* to read about me, to enhance my online reputation. And I want the DLA people to think in terms of "How can they help me make money" and "How can they help me self-publish", rather than just how they can monetize my eyeballs. My good friends at Opinity are starting to do some of this stuff.


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[ 22-Sep-06 6:05pm ] [ , ]