Serendipitous Feedsurfing with SSE and OPML

I recently became a fan of Ignat Drozdov's awesome BlogSEO weblog. His site, direct from Hawaii, is a must-read if you're interested in how to optimize a blog for search. (By the way Ignat, you are waaaay too good looking to be a blogger. Your agent called. He wants to cast you in the Point Break sequel.)

In a recent post, Ignat talks about the 10 things you must have on your blog's sidebar. I agree with pretty much all of them except one - the trusy blogroll. I feel blogrolls are on their way to extinction, even though the need they fill, to guide, is still going strong. (For newbies, blogrolls are published lists of recommended blogs.)

Dave Winer's brilliant Reading Lists seem to be waiting in the wings as the blogroll's natural successor. The idea here is that you subscribe to someone's dynamically updated cache of recommended RSS feeds. If this individual adds or subtracts a blog/feed, so do those who subscribe to the reading list. This is an improvement over a blogroll, but it still doesn't solve the overload problem. You keep building massive piles of feeds. Some are relevant, others aren't. This is where I think SSE can play a role. (Geeks, tell me if I got this all wrong.)

Microsoft recently announced an extension to RSS called SSE that turns feeds, formerly one-way streets, into two-way dynamic channels for information. What I would love to see in the coming months is a tool that uses SSE and reading lists to implement the wonderful features in Stumbleupon right inside an RSS reader.

Here's another way to picture it. What if users had a way inside their reader to publish an SSE-enabled RSS stream that pinged OPML (definition) reading lists around the world for feeds that match their own reading habits? Then that same feed could pull down the sources that most closely match the reader's preferences.

Technology like this will help users serendipitously feed surf for recommended blogs and news feeds yet limit overload by helping them be more targeted. This is the blogroll's future.

Technorati Tags: Blogrolls, Feedsurfing, OPML, Reading Lists, SSE, Stumbleupon