The news that CNET is aggregating RSS feeds within its site with Newsburst came as a relief to me as I work with Mark Cahill to develop a way for a non-technical community to participate in a community of blogs held loosely together by a common niche. After installing several feed readers I pretty much gave up using them for various reasons and wondered by I couldn’t point my subscribed feeds to a single page.
Mark came up with this prototype as an example of how a publisher can serve its users by pointing them to affiliated blogs through a master index and sub-category indices.
We’re still debugging it, but it seems essential to our strategy of providing WordPress based blogs to our 8,000 registered users while retaining the ties that bind the community together.
I expect to see other publishers leap onto the Newsburst bandwagon over the next three months to keep their users on the reservation.
Totally understand you’re building your own, but you might test Newsburst to see if it offers some of what you’re looking for you.
From the Manage Sources page, you could set up a category, and put all the blogs you care about in there, and then share that category with folks.
Just an idea.
Good luck with your work.
John Roberts
CNET News.com product development
http://www.news.com
http://www.newsburst.com