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Tuesday May 31

Idea for a milblog news aggregator

I met a red-white-and-blue guy at the Memorial Day picnic at the American international school and we were discussing milblogs. He told me that there aren't more than a couple hundred milblogs because the bloggers keep getting rotated out or get killed or injured. But a lot of people are interested in reading milblogs, especially friends and families of servicemen and women. Two things interested me:

1. People who read a milblog are likely to read more than one
2. There isn't really a directory for milblogs, but there is a webring which is maintained manually at http://www.mudvillegazette.com/

What if there was a directory for milblogs that operated like a news aggregator that looked like this website. It would grab headlines and truncated content from RSS feeds and display them on a single page with a link back to the originating milblog. So milblog readers could get updated easily on several milblogs at once. They would also get previews of new milblogs that they might want to read.

This aggregator itself would have its own RSS feed. And it would be easily manageable because the universe of milblogs is quite limited and will never rise very high. The membership would be initially based on the milblog webring membership with opt-out.

It's really easy to do (just a couple days of design and testing) and very low maintenance. I'd be interested in working with someone who is interested in developing milblogs.

Technorati Tags: milblog, milbloggers, rss, aggregator, webring, directory

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