In the past week much has been written about extending the idea of Shared Feeds that you can create and make available for others using Google Reader or even a standalone RSS client like FeedDemon. It is because of some great posts by Louis Gray that we have found out about two such Shared Feed extenders – ReadBurner and Shared Reader.
Both of these feed aggregating services offer us all a great way to bring the diversity of the blogosphere that shared feeds offer. Rick Mahn also had a good post today about the advantages he sees this idea of things like ReadBurner and aggregators like it brings to the blogging table.
For me though these services aren’t the answer. As great as the idea is the biggest flaw I see with this aggregating of already aggregated feeds is the signal to noise ratio. I already subscribe to several shared feeds along with offering my own and the thing about them all; mine included to be honest, is that the reader may – if they are lucky – find one, two or three posts from these feeds of any interest – the rest is just noise; and if you have ever subscribed to Robert Scoble’s Link blog (no offence Robert 
) you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Even my shared feed is filled with esoteric things that I find of interest and feel like sharing just because I find them interesting. That doesn’t mean that anyone else will find even one story out the the ones I post to the shared feed of interest.
For me part of the reason for blogging is the sharing and discussion of ideas but when you are faced with the massive inundation of verbal diarrhea that can come with an ever increasing number of posts, the truth is that ideas simple get lost in the noise. Through it all though I keep coming back to a concept I first wrote about last August called Ideastreaming; where the ability to create a constantly updating RSS feed based on keywords or tags would bring you the information; regardless of who wrote about it, you wanted. This way rather than having to sift through the noise before you can even get to a point of figuring out the value of what you have you are starting with the conversations you want to be a part of or read about.
Tags are the key to ideastreaming, the key for you to create the feeds you want based on ideas or conversations about ideas you are interested. Central to this I have always felt was Technorati as they had everything in place to be able to bring it all together and provide bloggers with a truly excellent service – even more important than their so-called ranking authority system. However as I pointed out in a follow up post this feature of creating RSS feeds based on tags was nowhere to be found.
To their credit Ian Kellan from Technorati did comment on that post saying that …”Ack! I think that’s a bug. I don’t recall an explicit decision to disable it. I’ll find out.” and when I checked recently it appears this is indeed the fact as you can create a feed based on a single tag or on one that you have entered in their Advanced Search page.
Why is this important?
Because ideas are bigger than individual people, conversations are bigger than any A-List, B-List or take your pick of rankings. Being able to tap into conversations based on their tags or idea markers is far more powerful that any collection of aggregated posted by individual bloggers.
While the current implementation used on Technorati for creating tag based RSS feeds works I believe that there is a lot more they could do with the concept. Technorati is based on the use of tags after all we see them on just about 99% of all tech related blogs. They are the backbone of ideastreaming and if Technorati put some real effort and thought into expanding this conversation backbone of blogging they could very well find themselves back as the go to place once again.
It is one thing to search blogs – any search engine can do that all with varying degrees of competency but to be able to be the breeding ground of ideas and conversations – well that is a different ball game entirely and right now it’s an open field with Technorati having just the barest of edge on everyone else.
