Just a few toughts from reading Dave Winer's essay. 
About easying the way to find the relevant feeds (and to educate yourself on how to do it) reading lists can make the difference. They can help newbies to get in touch with this new source of information, and they can make it in a selective, subject-oriented fashion.
In this way they can be useful also for seasoned blog readers. I might well be a Microsoft systems expert and already know all about Vista-SQLServer-... weblogs, but my interestes may change, or I might want to see what is going on in the Linux-OSS world: reading lists with their theme-focus might be a huge help to get into the discourse (and when I'm not anymore interested in those subjects I just unsubscribe for the reading list).
I feel that this captures well my personal experience with weblogs, where I regularly read very few (currently less than 15) weblogs and use them as starting points or filters for the relevant news (I'm implicitly expressing my trust on those authors). When i see some interesting new weblog, and I keep seeing interesting things in my reading list from that weblog I might well add it to the regulars.
Regarding subscription list centralization. I did post something about when Dave first spoke about the "yahoo problem", but i have come to agree that it is basically a political problem (giving up the control on the users' subscription seems hard on the big players). Anyhow, the technology is so simple (maybe a few hours work), it would be great if someone builds it and tries to pursue a VC 2.0 style of financing and supporting it. I think that it would actually be the ideal candidate for such an experiment.
