Anne Zelenka has written an excellent post on how she envisions using reading lists. She says,

Big lists, lists with 100 or 200 or 1,000 feeds in them, those provide fodder for displays that aggregate, filter, summarize, pivot, contextualize, and personalize my news.

She is right about the need for what I would call “intelligent aggregators”:

Perhaps it shouldn't be called a reading list if it's used as input for an app that filters, rotates, and distills the contents into something that's information dense. It looks like the same thing–a dynamic OPML file hosted at a URL–but it's not used in the way we've been talking about using reading lists. Whatever you call it, this is the sort of thing I'm seeing great use for, but only in combination with better options for finding important conversations and concentrating them into a format that readers can grok quickly. The big challenge I see now is developing ways beyond simply looking for links to identify important topics. That may work well for politics and tech, but different domains need additional filtering and identification mechanisms, like comment counting and text analysis, perhaps even some Bayesian classification to make the news as informational as possible.

Share This

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 11:45 am and is filed under Innovation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.