More on Reading Lists

On a first layer reading lists could act as a clustering and categorization tool allowing a reader to organize its subscription by topic.

I’d say that it can be more useful for newbies delegating their choice of blogs to others than for seasoned blog-readers which know how to find thier way around the blogsphere.

A side effect of this would be the rise of a new kind of actors: the meta-bloggers or blog-editors if you want, that is reading list authors which (maybe don’t blog that much but) read a lot and have a particular sensibility for some argument and whose reading lists are considered authorative for some subject.

On another layer by subscribing a reading list or by creating it I’m declaring my attention to and to some extent my trust for those authors, and probably to the subjects treated on those blogs.

A promising application of reading lists to aggregators technology would be the use of this information to filter out the content from the rest of the blogsphere corpus.

I would like to be able to (automatically) discover relevant stories on blogs I’m not reading based on what I already find relevant.
The rise of the meme-tracking services (see also here) means that there is a real need for fresh ways to find the breaking news which go beyond scanning flow of news you are subscribed to.