Reading Someone Else's Feeds

Bloglines allows users to make 'what feeds they read' public. (ie mine, amy gahran, martsanz, mfagan)

I started reading through Amy Gahran's feeds and I felt like a bit of a voyeur. Of course, SNSs allow people to spill a lot of info about themselves, and some people have no holds barred on what they write in their weblog, eurekster lets people share what they search for. And now bloglines lets people see what you read.

I am thinking outloud here, and just wondering what the implications for this are? It isn't like I could feasibly read everything Amy Gahran reads. But, I can tell a lot about her based on 1) what she reads and 2) how she categorizes it.

I guess this isn't much different than reading someone else's blogroll. In fact, I use bloglines to power my blogroll. However, I've had lots of blogrolls, and certainly didn't visit all of the people on it, every day. Nor, did I groom (trim, categorize) it like I groom my bloglines subs. Plus, an aggregator makes reading weblogs SO much more efficient. (Less Clicks - Notification of New Posts, etc) So, I tend to add more feeds as I can handle them (timewise) or when I feel like reading more blogs and there is nothing new in my newsreader.

Still Rambling.... I think browsing someone's public bloglines subs is the quickest way for me to find out about someone and what they are into. An advanced, yet still easy to digest, business card.

Bloglines also lets me see who subscribes to a weblog in list form (ie mine). What I'd like to see is a more advanced form of visualizing 2nd and 3rd degree connections, density of social networks, etc.

And last random thought/question: When will the big hosted blogging services (ie blogger, typepad, livejournal) integrate an aggregator. Imagine knowing not only what people search for (google), write(blogger) and read (bloglines). It wouldn't be too hard to guess what I was thinking if you could monitor all that. You could call it google brain monitor.

Comments

[Michael Fagan]

Nice post. I presume you found mine via Bloglines itself, although I've got the data in my FOAF file too. I see you've got similar data in your "I'm also a member..." bit.

LiveJournal does have an integrated aggregator, by the way, and you can see others'.

Btw, my public page on Bloglines doesn't list *all* the feeds I read. Some I've marked as private: self-tracking ones, Bloglines e-mail address ones, and blogs written by my real-life friends.

[Peter Caputa]

Hi Michael. Yes. I found you via bloglines. I haven't gotten into the FOAF stuff yet, but it is on my list of things to do.

Thanks for the tips on livejournal. I haven't delved into that yet.

I haven't delved into all the functionality on bloglines yet, either. Thanks for the tips on that.

And I am glad you are holding something back with keeping some things private. :)

Why is that, though?

[Michael Fagan]

Why make things private?

For one, the self-track stuff doesn't really serve anyone but me. So I think it would "pollute" the Bloglines search engine results.

Also, my real-life friends that blog, most of them don't even know that they're blogging, and probably wouldn't want to see their blogs indexed by various tools. I haven't asked any of them though.

Move FOAF up on your list! :-)

[Lilia]

You may be interested checking "Share your OPML!" and tools that use its data. More at:
http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/18.html#a903
http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/14.html#a1084

You can upload your subscription list as well, somewhere inside Bloglines have function of creating OPML file from your subscriptions...

[Amy Gahran]

Cool! I have influence! I affected one person's life and made him think, and he shared his thoughts!

This is a good day :-)

- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS