Are reading lists dynamic? Hell yeah.
Update: I may have misunderstood Josh on the meaning of “dynamic.” I still contend that dynamic lists are meaningful. But I’ll have to follow up, with a non-post level example. Below, still holds true, I think.
Update 2:So I thought about a dynamic lists example, and dynamic meaning that it programmtically changes because of feed relevance and not post relevance. Josh might be right. reading lists may have to be hand crafted. We’ll keep an eye on this.
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Josh Porter contends that he’s interested in the post at this point, not the feed, which questions the usefulness of an OPML reading list.
He says:
Going forward, my guess is that we’ll be more interested in the post-level relevance, as opposed to feed-level relevance. Or, perhaps that’s easy for me to say because I already feel like I have enough feeds to read (about 200).
Well, sure. Josh is not looking for a techie blogger reading list, except to maybe see if he’s missing one that his good friend reads. He might feel differently if he wants to join a new conversation over the next month on a subject he is unfamiliar with.
Here is another scenario:
Suppose Josh is in school this year.
The professor says, subscribe to my Blog.
In a post he says to subscribe to the lab teacher’s blog.
In fact he suggests or requires this sort of thing many times over the year.
Well, you could organize them in a folder and subscribe and delete them as the year changes. . . . orrrrrrrr. . . .
Subscribe to Professor Plum’s Blogger 101 reading list (glist) and know you are in sync until summer vacation (ignore the summer reading list while at the beach with your friends. that doesn’t change).
So, reading lists are dynamic, but they might change slowly over long periods of time.
As Josh suggests, they are not the right format to aggregate quickly changing topics.
We do that at the post level.