Exploring the blogsphere

James Robertson blogs about the way which his RSS reader has changed the way he consumes information. I’ve found exactly the same thing over the past few months. I can’t remember who it was that described the blog world as “like usenet, without the boring people”.

I find that the best way to find new interesting blogs is to assume that “X thinks Y’s blog is good” is transitive. So, I end up collecting new RSS feeds because they’ve been linked from one of my current feeds, or because they’re on the blogroll of a feed. I don’t always stick with them in the long term though. So, it’d be nice if an RSS reader could package up this behaviour somehow. Maybe you’d have a “Suggest five new feeds for me” feature? But an automated system would require metadata on each blog page to direct you to the RSS feed for that blog. This would let a program chase links between blogs and get to the RSS easily. I don’t know if that meta-information exists today.