The Tangled Banks

I went to the Cleveland Blogger Meetup. Thanks, George, for organizing it. I enjoyed both the company and the food.

First, we briefly discussed the idea of tagging. I don't think anyone needs to wait for a standardized tagging system. Start using tags that mean something to you and organization will emerge. I don't think it will take very long for de facto standardization to emerge around the most useful tags. "Cleveland", for instance.

I think someone mentioned the idea of aggregating Cleveland blogs. I don't see the advantage of having one Cleveland feed. Subscribing to individual blogs in Bloglines is as easy as can be and gives me precise control over what gets my attention. For those who may still prefer a common feed, George added a feature to the sidebar of Brewed Fresh Daily: Recent NEO. Unfortunately, it's not subscribable and it only tells you who's updated but doesn't give a preview or even a title.

Since I'm using blogger I've got a limited selection of tools. Wordpress has a variety of plugins that make aggregating fairly easy but I've got to rely on the kindness of strangers who are willing to host a web service. With that in mind, here are some toys that I dug up over the past few days:

The Cleveland Zeitgeist is a tagcloud generated from about 20 Clevelandish feeds. Right now Cleveland (or, rather, the very small sample that I randomly chose) is interested in corned beef. And it wasn't even because of me. I created an aggregate feed of a different group of Clevelandish feeds: preview, rss. Here's another one with a different group of blogs: preview, rss. And here's a search that covers me, Brewed Fresh Daily, Callahan's Cleveland Diary, Democracy Guy, Cleveland Canvas and Tremonter:

Search in...
Cleveland

I think the most interesting idea was the suggestion to have a roving review of the local blog community. (I'm still getting used to the word "blog". "Blogosphere" may take some time.)

I remember the original Carnival of the Vanities. It has no homepage but you can follow it at the founder's blog. And I wanted to follow the Tangled Bank but it slipped away. Now there are far too many to keep track of. There's an economics one that looks interesting.

Tags: cleveland, blogging