When I was in Helsinki, I started thinking about RSS aggregators like NewNewsWire. More particularly I started to think about what extra functionality they should be able to provide.
Personal Blogdex: Here’s the most obvious idea. You have a whole set of feeds, all of which are time-limited (ie. things expire) and everything’s in a machine-readable format, and yet these readers don’t do anything with the data apart from display it. There doesn’t seem to be any specific reason why this is the case. So here’s my first suggestion:
A pane that collates and displays the most popular links that your feeds have referenced. A personal Blogdex…
Suggested Weblogs: Again – NetNewsWire can export OPML lists of your subscriptions (and you can stick that online if you like) – but it doesn’t do anything with the lists that are being put online by other sites. It seems to me entirely possible to reference an OPML file in your own RSS feed (or even include it in your feed) in such a way that an RSS reader could read it. I don’t know whether or not NetNewsWire could realistically be set to upload an OPML file to a server (although Kung-Tunes has no trouble), but it could still read things put online by more human means. And that leads me to my second suggestion:
A pane that collates and displays the most popular weblogs that the people you subscribe to are themselves subscribed to…
More RSS, subscriptions and NetNewsWire stuff: