Thanks for the feedback both on the board and via email. Great stuff.
Part 1: I’ve created a mailing list called lapoker at goodtimeslist.com. You can send a subscribe request to lapoker-subscribe. It’s a subscription moderated list which means that I’ll have to approve you before you’re added to the list but once on the list it’s unmoderated.
Part 2: Some interesting emails on this one. First, I’ll try to explain it in a little more detail as there seemed to be some confusion. This wouldn’t be a replacement for Bloglines, GatorNews, SharpReader or any other RSS/XML reader. In general terms, what I was thinking of is that instead of going to example.com to get their RSS feed, it would be spidered by the aggregator program and all of the story links back to example.com would be modified so when they were clicked on it could keep score as to what was being read.
The idea is that you’ll end up with two types of scores; the first being for an entire site and the second being for individual posts. So, let’s say in a universe of 200 poker blogs, all 200 are being read by the people who use the aggregator feeds instead of getting them directly from the source. I certainly don’t have time to read 200 blogs every day but there’s certainly some quality postings I might be missing out on, on the sites I don’t read regularly (or at all). But if a post on a blog I don’t read gets enough clicks from other people, it would be included in a list of today’s top 50 (or 100 or ??) posts of the day and I can subscribe to that XML feed and see the day’s most popular blog postings.
Obviously, a blog like Iggy’s would always rank very high because he’s likely to have many, many people subscribing to his feed. I’ll have to come up with some sort of scoring model to even things like that out a bit but hopefully the result is a good mix of quality and popularity that eases the data burden on people trying to keep up with what’s going on in the poker blogosphere.
Based on the responses it seems to be something with some demand so I’ll keep kicking around some ideas on this and maybe work up a small prototype fairly soon. Unfortunately, my schedule is a little hectic the next couple of weeks. I’m in NY and NJ next week and then up in Portland for a week in the beginning of March. I’ll try to squeeze some time in here or there to see what develops.
If anybody has any ideas or wants to lend some PHP or Perl skills to this, drop me a line.