Churning urns of burning funk 

Dave mentions reading lists as virtual publications. This follows a loose thread of posts over the past few days about aggregator types and the way IE handles RSS.

There's a tendency to think of reading lists as topic-oriented and fairly static -- refined and appended to, but keeping most of the same data over time. A slant on reading lists I've thought about are specialized lists that change their composition entirely on a periodic basis, a list in which none of the feeds you see today may be there next week.

It seems like a natural for use in education, where an instructor might change the feeds for each unit, but the students would remain subscribed to a single reading list throughout the term.

Another application might be a web tour. A blogger might to take you to a few places each week or month that you wouldn't investigate on your own. In fact, it could take the place of supplementary "link blogs" or the practice of packing a blog post with links. The differerence is this would allow readers to dig deeper into the topic because they're subscribing short-term to a feed, not just making a one-off visit to a web site.

(Oh. If the headline reference eludes you? It's a lyric from a James Taylor song, Steamroller. He could do blues. I used to love his stuff and still do love the old songs up through the Gorilla album. I lost interest in the later material some decades ago. I'm not sure why. Did he change or did I?)

Reading lists on BlogBridge 

Here's the BlogBridge FAQ on their reading lists.

"Since we launched the feature about a week ago, there are already over 50 reading lists created," Pito Salas said yesterday.

Consultants getting on board 

The Otter Group, an online learning consultancy, seems way into reading lists.