I’ve been carrying on and on about Reading Lists, so I thought it was time to step back and quickly review what they are and why I am so excited about them.

As far as I know, the term and concept of Reading Lists (as applied to collections of RSS Feeds) was invented by none other than Dave Winer. And the enabling format, OPML, also a Winer invention. I first heard the term from him several years ago and liked it in principle but didn’t really know how to use them in practice. Here’s Dave’s description from back in January 2004:

“One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf.” (Read the whole thing)

So, a Reading List lets one person select and share a collection of feeds. For example, here is Kathleen Gilroy’s Reading List on what she calls Web 2.0. Now if you click on that link you get a bunch of indecipherable OPML stuff. You need a tool, like BlogBridge to both create and subscribe to Reading Lists.

With a tool like that, anyone out there who knows Kathleen and respects her opinion on Learning would be interested in her Reading List, and maybe read the same feeds. And as she decided to tweak her list, they’d like to hear about that too.

Kathleen has become a Feed Jockey!

(By the way, here’s Kathleen’s post explaining Reading Lists, which is probably clearer than this one

Reading Lists allow a kind of grass roots expertise sharing or editorializing specifically in the blogosphere or more broadly, the feedosphere.

So imagine a world in which all sorts of experts: on topics grand and trivial are able to share with their readers their recommended feeds on this or the other thing. And that there was a way for anyone to find out these recommendations and directly subscribe to them to follow them as they changed.

Some of the pieces like OPML, have been in place. More recently, aggregators like BlogBridge have added to the puzzle.  However there are still pieces missing and it’s still too hard to do.

There’s more work to be done!

Technorati Tags: davewiner, OPML, readinglists