Ten Reasons Why

I stumbled across the Internet Topic Exchange [via Seblogging]. The Internet Topic Exchange is “a central server to host TrackBack-powered channels.”
Apparently, anyone can create a topic — say “Foobar.” Then when I write a post about foobar on my weblog, I can use Trackback to ping that topic. My post then gets listed in the topic’s channel. Anyone can use a news aggregator to subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular topic channel.
I think this is a great idea. One of the weaknesses of weblogging, IMHO, has always been the difficulty of discovering weblogs and posts that have overlapping interests. In other words, it’s not necessarily easy to build community when everyone’s publishing a their own silo (or, more accurately, their own local barnyard with a few silos).
The one big glaring flaw in the Internet Topic Exchange’s approach is their taxonomy. The listing of all topics is not only flat/non-hierarchical, but it’s not even alphabetized, ferpetesake. The difficulty of discovering weblogs and posts is being replicated in the difficulty of discovering topics. :-/

Greg Weblogs