We are actively working on (IMHO) a really cool new capability in BlogBridge — Reading Lists. There has been a bit of writing about Reading Lists recently (not that it’s a new idea) but in case you don’t know what it is, here’s my definition:

A Reading List is a collection of Feeds maintained by one party for the benefit of another. That’s all there is to it. So your Blogroll is kind of a reading list, as is one of our BlogBridge expert lists. As it turns out there are already various people around the Blogosphere maintaining reading lists. A reading list is known by its hyperlink (URL.)

We are building BlogBridge’s reading list in two steps, one after the other. The first step is to add the ability for one person to monitor/follow/see/use a reading list that exists somewhere on the web. Here’s how it will work.

Any BlogBridge ‘guide’ (which is like a folder to you non-BlogBridge users) can be automatically be populated with all the feeds mentioned in someone else’s reading  list.

You can see that all we’ve done is to add a ‘reading list’ tab to a guide where you can see what reading list is being followed, when it last changed, and where it lives.

More advanced users will have good control over the behavior of reading lists - how often to check whether they’ve changed, what to do when a change is detected, and so on. We have added a new tab to our Preferences… dialog box for this purpose. Take a look at the image to the right, it should be farely self explanatory.

In the near future I will describe the second step, which is the ability to author or create a reading list. Please let us know what you think of this approach - and how you would use it!

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