There are a few updates on the project and the technology that are worth mentioning.

First, with Matt Mower we are working on improving his liveTopics Radio tool in order to make it work as part of a "cloud". Even if it will most probably change soon, currently we are investigating the use of OPML files to distribute clouds' metadata. As far as the Italian Blog aggregator is concerned, users will be able to subscribe to an opml cloud file which will provide the sets of types and topics (in this case participants are not able to add new topics) straight to their liveTopic tool without the need of any special configuration.

All topics and types will then be included in RSS 2.0 feeds, to be used centrally to categorize each single post.

On the aggregator side, which is developed by Giuseppe Granieri, there are several ideas about how metadata could be exploited to improve the service and add more value.

Yesterday we had a pretty long discussion with Giuseppe and Cesare Lamanna about user rating, or "identity, trust and reputation" as Doug put it. In the specific case of the Italian BlogAggregator, which is a closed "club" of bloggers who have been invited, trust and reputation are somewhat less relevant since there's a very strong filter at the very beginning of the process and, in the case somebody would misbehave, he or she would probably thrown out by Giuseppe :-)

Anyway, we are absolutely still at a very experimental level, also if the first results are in sight and look quite promising. Let's keep digging.

Each time I try to look up their name on google they don't seem to be anywhere in sight. Doh!