(2002-03-11) a

Because Jon Udell (agreeing with Shelley Powers) wants a WebLog's RSS feed to be a teaser to lead you into reading its full content in situ, he wants blog tools to make it easy to provide metadata (heads/decks/leads) for entries, and for RSS to distribute them. I think it would be sufficient just to limit an RSS entry to the first paragraph of a blog entry. Obviously that would require a little bit of artificial editing of an entry (e.g. as in Jon's link you wouldn't want to start with a paragraph quoting someone else). But I think it would be an improvement. (On the other hand, I want my BlogWeb tool grabbing all the hrefs from an entire entry so I can track relations between blogs. Plus I might want the full body-text so I can assign my own categoryies to it.)

Meanwhile, Shelley reminds us that humans are the best sources of new blog recommendations. But a good BlogWeb reader (which doesn't yet exist) helps you manage the ever-growing list of blogs you're reading.