Rodent Regatta

Every once in a while it’s great to see experienced web folks who speak up about things you’ve been pondering. Some bizarre sense of ”they’ve already figured that out,” prevents me from saying anything about what I see that’s wrong with so many weblogs, tools and techniques.

This morning, Sam Ruby talks about meeting people at conferences and finding that he didn’t know who they were until he heard the name of their weblog/web site. I’ve thought about that as I read names in my blogroll and my news aggregator. If I read a post somewhere that says, ”Sam said…,” I seldom remember which weblog to associate with Sam. The reverse is also true.

Phil Ringnalda elaborates and offers a solution or two. I simply want blogrolling.com and FeedDemon to allow me to group names using identical or separate groupings. Then, I want one file for tracking both and I want the tools to prompt me for both the person’s name and the weblog title.

Better still, let me subscribe to ”well-formed RSS feeds” that have all the details and drop those details into proper places based upon checkboxes I pick in preferences or during the subscription process. Do you want to subscribe to this person’s feed? What channel group? Do you want to blogroll this person? Which blogroll? Who is this? What’s the name of their site?