BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?.

Sebastien reports on a very cool project. BlogChannels could be a powerful tool... and it might save me a lot of manual work that I need to do for Seblogging. If people simply "pinged" a common channel I would not need to sift through all the stuff that is getting published on the individual Weblogs. This is especially the case with less focused Weblogs where only now and then a posts refers to educational applications of personal Webpublishing and Weblogging...

[Seblogging News]

The BlogChannels idea presented here merges very neatly with the work I am doing with liveTopics + RSS2.0 and one of the suggested applications of that work, i.e. consolidating multiple RSS feeds based upon topic information.  The nice thing is that this work can be easily duplicated for any blogging system.

Pretty Damn Cool: BlogStreet

I just checked out BlogStreet and I have to say that it's pretty damn cool.  I know Veer one of the authors via IM from India and periodically he pops onto my radar with a new BlogStreet feature and says "Is it ready yet?".  Using my mighty "bermuda triangle of software bugs" power I give it a whirl and he very nicely takes the feedback.  He and I just spoke again and there are several new Blogstreet features, BlogStreet icons and more.  More on this next week when people are reading again.  Until then it's worth a definite look.

[The FuzzyBlog!]

I am always as fascinated by these things as I am disappointed by not being in the top #10.  Oh well, now you know I'm an egomaniac so the cats out of the bag :P

Weekly world news quiz. Test your knowledge of the stories making the headlines around the world this week. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Want to know how much you are tapped into the pulse of the world?  I am ashamed to say I got only 2/10, they were guesses, and I subscribe to the BBC World news feed damnit!

Matt Mower's Knowledge Log - ( liveTopics, k-log, radio, blogging, RSS ): "This will enable a smart aggregator to use the topic's for filtering & combining feeds together." + filtering is in the pipeline for myRadio, on dates, keywords, and now topics. will be tricky to devise a UI.
+ filter a single feed, or multiple feeds. multiple feeds would require agreement on a common pool of topics, i think.
+ Syndication, with meta-data, gathered by smart aggregators, has a lot of possibilities. It would be cool to hear more about usage scenarios. [Brain Off]

Mikel picks up on my post yesterday regarding adding topics to Radio RSS.  I've got a few things in mind for this, but I'm sure others will really lead the way.  Let's just address one point first.

When trying to handle feeds from multiple blogs, inevitably, as Mikel points out, we will reach the situation where people using different words to mean the same topic.  This will be a problem, but hopefully not as a big of a problem as it could be.  It is for this reason that I have been tracking XFML so carefully.  With XFML we have the ability to say "A's topic X is the same as B's topic Y".  liveTopics already does XFML.

So I think the first and simplest usage scenario will be within the type of aggregators that we have now as a way of filtering a feed to get rid of posts we deem irrelevant.  This will allow us to subscribe to many, many more feeds since we don't have to weed out so much chaff.  Although I think we'll need to be careful as it may make it more difficult to experience serendipitous moments.

The next scenario I can imagine is as a way of producing a consolidated "on-topic" feed from a number of other feeds.  Combined with technology to scrape RSS from sites and databases and with a little automagic to add topics where they don't exist this could be very powerful.

My imagination runs out here, maybe someone else..?

Google Is Not A Search Engine. Google is an interface to the structure of the web. Google orders its results based on the structure of the ... [istori/log]

Kiss it goodbye. With industry henchmen in complete control of Washington, the Clean Air Act, wilderness preserves and environmental enforcement are all endangered species. [Salon.com]

America is turning into a gigantic socio-economic laboratory.  Has there ever before been a country so close to rule by corporation?  If Bush manages to get another term it will really give him and his buddies a chance to insinuate themselves, it will also give them a mandate to disassemble more and more of the American state.  Who knows where this will lead?  Fascinating.

[Note: It required a real effort of will to unindent my comment and format it like this, without the little chevron]