Everything started with the idea of an aggregator that would categorize and give visibility to weblogs posts. Giuseppe Granieri very quickly implemented a version of this aggregator and has been adding features on almost daily basis. It's somehow a very low tech approach: bloggers have to visit an admin page after they have posted something and notify the aggregator.

Nonetheless the site has become quite popular and I find myself visiting it very often to see what's going on.

I think that there are a few interesting concepts with this approach.

By invitation only

The first feature of this aggregator is that it works by invitation only. A group of about 60 bloggers have received a password that allows them to notify their posts. This selection, that has been done by the aggregator author, somehow creates an added value to the system and removes a lot of background noise. Of course, the aggregator editor is inviting new people and can also close existing accounts.

Selective publishing

Given the manual notification process, webloggers are not notifying every single post they make but only the ones they somehow feel are worth exposing. This creates an additional editorial level that helps keeping the clutter level low.

Categorization

In the notification process every blogger has to fill the following fields:

• Title of the post
• Short description
• Permalink
• Category (chosen from a list: politics, music, technology, weblogs, etc.)
• Post length (short/long)
• Tone of the post (chosen from a list: informative, ironic, personal, etc.)
• Thread (optional, chosen from a list of current threads maintained by the editor)
• Optionally every weblogger can give a spin to his post clicking on a check-box. This will make the post appear in the top area of the page, but it has to be used carefully: the system is based on credit basis, so there's only a limited amount of times you can choose this option.

Categorizing posts at the time you write them (or right after you write them as it currently happens) is in my opinion how it should work, it's the solution that makes more sense and provides a significant added value to the system.

We also implemented RSS feeds for the categorized posts, meaning that I can subscribe to only a few of the categories with my personal news aggregator and be up to date without even visiting the aggregator site.

Where to go from here

From my point of view the next step is defining an architecture to make this approach scalable and that would allow the creation of other aggregators. The current aggregator has so far proved to be useful and efficient, now I would like to get rid of the manual notification.

Most probably I'm influenced by the work that I've been doing with Matt Mower and LiveTopics, but I think that the most logical approach would be adding metadata about the posts into the RSS 2.0 feed using a module defined in a namespace. The aggregator could harvest weblogs feeds and categorize posts according to this metadata. Adding topic data to RSS 2.0 feeds is something that can already be done with LiveTopics.

Ideally, once I subscribe to an aggregator cloud my local topic list will be kept synchronized with a central server (or servers). This could be implemented using the XML topic maps standard (XTM) but we are investigating other ideas as well.

The Challenge

The real challenge is going to be enabling many different tools to support these standards. Of the 60 current participants to the Blog Aggregator initiative, some use Radio, some Movable Type, others Blogger or services provided by third parties. Most of these bloggers don't even have RSS feeds, let alone topics and categories.

The other challenge is make the front end simple, very simple. Content categorization is far from easy and quick to understand, and any tool that would add a significant overhead to the blogger efforts will simply be ignored.

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