More on Reading Lists

As I read more about reading lists (how they can be used to create hierarchies of data), I got excited about the possibilities surrounding Community Lists. So, I sent our OPML files to Dave Winer and, after a bit of tweaking on our end, our lists are now part of the OPML Editor Reading lists.

What does this mean? For starters, it’s another place to look at our human-edited lists. Also, if the concept of reading lists takes off (and they should!), everyone should be able to access a fresh batch of feeds whenever any of our Community Lists gets updated. In the future, think hierarchies. There are many different sub-lists that can be created with education, librarianship, sports, etc. Remember when you saw the Yahoo directory for the first time and were amazed by the number of different sub-directories there were? Reading Lists can be the same thing, but automatically updated in your aggregator.

I’m hoping that the high end aggregators (Bloglines, Newsgator, My Yahoo, etc) will incorporate reading list capabilities in future releases. When I speak to groups about blogs, I am always asked how they can make sense of them all. I think reading lists are the answer. Of course, I also think that the lists should be maintained and monitored by humans and not computers. Lots of ‘I hopes’ and ‘I thinks’ in this post and this is just the beginning of blog and feed organization, but we have to start somewhere.

One more note about the directory. The list order will change every day as they are displayed by LinkRank. An added bonus. Wouldn’t it be great if they displayed this way and changed daily (based on influence) in your aggregator?