A podcast about Feed Grazing (and much more)

I've been listening to Alex Barnett's Attention podcasts for months now so I was very flattered to be invited on the latest episode, recorded this weekend. Unfortunately I couldn't make it but I'm still wondering how I managed to be invited on a panel with Adam Green, Danny Ayers and Josh Porter. These guys have so much collective experience and knowledge that its scary to be engaged in any kind of intellectual exchanges with them! Alex publishes details on their backgrounds here and shownotes for the podcast which covered the ideas behind Feed Grazing and Grazing Lists, among other things.

A few quick comments on some of the items that came up -

• Adam considers grazing as a way of getting to individual posts, as opposed to feeds. Agreed. He also thinks of it as being like browsing but with feeds. Spot on!
• Adam says that Grazing Lists and Reading Lists are exactly the same thing but I have a different way of looking at it. While it's true that they are in the technical sense there's an important conceptual difference. It seems that there is a consensus around the idea that a Reading List should be 10 feeds or less so I would define a Reading List as a manually generated low volume, low frequency (of change) list. Whereas a Grazing List is a high volume, high frequency list which is more likely to be generated programmatically, as with Adam's Tech.Memeorandum mashup. But del.icio.us and its ilk will also do this for us.
• Danny is interested in the idea of using feed readers to look at more general data, not just blog posts. Again this is spot on. This is the idea I was trying to make when I wrote that we're all edge cases.

Pito Salas of BlogBridge, the excellent Reading Lists capable feed aggregator, is understandably concerned about us putting the cart before the horse -

"... in the fun and excitement of Semantic Web and OPML name spaces, and dynamic, meta-dynamic, and hyper-dynamic reading lists, it’s easy to lose sight of the universal appeal of sharing ones enthusiasm."

- but I think the two approaches to feed access are absolutely complementary. BlogBridge is an ideal means to producing and Reading Lists while Feed Grazers will more likely be used to consume high volume, high frequency Grazing Lists. Of course an ideal solution would be for BlogBridge to support both models. All it needs to add is hierarchical OPML browsing.

Comments

[Danny]

Shame you couldn't make it - next time!

Re. "we're all edge cases", yup, exactly.

Bonus points for slipping in the BlogBridge feature request ;-)

[James Corbett]

Well I thorougly enjoyed listening Danny because the group really stiched together so many important ideas. And believe it or not I'm slowly developing an understanding of the Sematic Web. :)

[Pito Salas]

The feature request wasn't lost on me :) And it underlines a question that I've definitely already been giving thought to.

It also occurs to me, that given that BlogBridge has a web service working behind the scenes to do some of its heavy lifting, that some of the stuff that Danny described in the Out of Eden (http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/02/12/out-of-eden/) post could be done by the BlogBridge service ...

[James Corbett]

Excellent Pito. I already love BlogBridge but if you can include OPML hierarchical browsing then... wow! :)