Years ago I had an idea: all blogging software should have a built-in feed reader, sort of like an old-school blogroll that doubled as an RSS reader. Point being: if we want to encourage folks to create blogs, why not make it easy to get hooked on reading them? It would provide a bit of that ambient humanity that keeps people coming back to social media.

Tumblr kind of has this, but I haven't seen this anywhere else, although all the glue is there. If blogging is to undergo a resurgence, it seems like we need something like this. I'm intrigued by Adam Mathes' idea of providing a public list of feeds similar to robots.txt, possibly along with a rel="alternate" link that allows future software to discover it. Here's hoping some smart engineer at Wordpress or Perch glues this stuff together. (n.b. yeah, I know it's not trivial to run a feed reader service, just saying that it's achievable.)

So here's mine. I'm actually aghast that, once I pruned long-extinct feeds, only 50 feeds remained, and even some of those are dormant. I'm looking forward to expanding my reading lists based on what others are already starting to publish. It's hard finding new voices in the roar, but like most things, personal recommendations are a great thing.