Anne Truitt Zelenka

We need new paradigms for following what’s happening in the blogosphere. According to Dave Sifry, the number of weblogs tracked by Technorati has doubled approximately every five months over the last 36 months.

I’m loving Amy Bellinger’s Churning urns of burning funk, where she proposes a superdynamic form of reading list: “specialized lists that change their composition entirely on a periodic basis, a list in which none of the feeds you see today may be there next week.” Now that’s an idea that will help with the incredible growth in the number of weblogs. I think a churning-burning reading list may be more useful than a static one. It would support the grazing style of feed reading described by one of Danny Ayers’ commenters. I have in mind doing such a list in tandem with my Tech & Web blog on BlogHer. I would provide a reading list that includes the bloggers I’m covering for each post, so that each week a subscriber could be exposed to a new set of bloggers in tech. If there was one whose writing you liked or who covered subjects of interest to you, you could subscribe permanently.

This idea is related to Adam Green’s ultimate fire hose, where he’s constructing a churning feed of Memeorandum sources. Sources come and go. You don’t have to worry about subscribing or unsubscribing to individual ones. If someone’s on fire (burning!), you’ll see them. If they take a break, they go away. But they can always come back to the conversation. Meanwhile, someone new comes in (churning!)

Pito Salas, BlogBridge developer, liked Amy’s idea too. I’ve been trying out BlogBridge for about a week. I find the SmartFeeds feature key to writing up BlogHer posts. If I find that one author on BlogHer’s Technology blogroll has written about a topic of interest, then I can set up a SmartFeed in BlogBridge with relevant keywords to find other bloggers on the topic. I did that for my Sunday stroll yesterday where I covered iPods and iTunes. I didn’t deal much there with controversy over Apple’s approach to downloadable music, but if you’re thinking about that sort of thing, I found James Governor’s writeup useful. I also enjoyed Elisa Camahort’s coverage of the issue.

There’s a real need for better tools for those bloggers who write at multiple places, offer link blogs, create and maintain reading lists, and write survey posts linking to large numbers of sources. I’m exploring many tools that help right now, but I haven’t figured out which are keepers and how I should organize my feed reading, article writing, and reading list maintaining activities. I also haven’t spent any time with feed remixers like those tracked by Library clips. So for now I’m not ready to maintain a churning-burning reading list.

Meanwhile, what’s a good name for bloggers who maintain reading lists or mashup other feeds, kind of acting like human Memeorandums? Feed jockey? I’d prefer something more organic and involving reciprocal action between the feed authors and the feed remixer/editor/aggregator. Memeorandum definitely affects how people blog and good human Memeorandums likewise influence their sources.