Transparent feedreading

A correspondent wrote this morning asking for my RSS subscriptions in OPML format. They're here, and I've added that link to my page template as well.¹ This was a useful reminder because my old Radio UserLand-generated OPML file hasn't been updated since I quit using Radio UserLand's RSS reader. What's published as my blogroll, nowadays, comes from Bloglines.

The transparency of this arrangement, whereby the sources I subscribe to in my newsreader are reflected automatically as my blogroll, has fascinated me from the get-go. As I pointed out in my initial review of Bloglines, there are lots of kinds of transparency built into the system. For example, if you want to see the blogosphere through my lens you can try it on for size without even importing my blogroll. Conversely I'll sometimes try on the lens of someone who subscribes to me. When those folks use folders, it's fascinating to see which folder I land in. Come to think of it, an aggregated view of your own (or someone else's) categorizations, as expressed in folder names -- which are just tags, after all -- might be useful. I could do it myself but it's a low priority, so I'll just summon the LazyWeb in case anyone's interested.

Managing boundaries in this era of growing transparency is one of the harder challenges we all face. Most of us, most of the time, can barely keep with up with simple binary decisions. Should the Bloglines feeds I subscribe to be public or private? I choose public, you might choose private, but neither of us likely has time to micromanage the list, making decisions on a per-feed basis in Bloglines as well as on a per-item basis in other services too. I call this the Dan Geer ACLS-don't-scale problem, and we've hardly begun to wrap our heads around it.

¹ Update: I forgot one OPML detail which I'm noting here for my own future reference, as well as for anyone else who runs into the same situation. The reason that people were still finding my old OPML file at udell.infoworld.com/gems/mySubscriptions.opml is that this bit of code, in the HEAD section of my template, was telling their software to look there:

<link rel="subscriptions" type="text/x-opml" title="Subscriptions" href="http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/mySubscriptions.opml" />

Oops. I've updated it now to:

<link rel="subscriptions" type="text/x-opml" title="Subscriptions" href="http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=judell" />

Thanks for reminding me, Kael.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/06.html#a1145