Greater and lesser blog divides

Several people of late have noted the great linkage divide between livejournal and the rest of the blogosphere. I have a feeling this divide will diminish over time.

I wanted to get rid of the blogroll to the left. There were two reasons for this. First, I was only reading those blogs that pinged weblogs.com, since they showed up on the roll as “new.” Second, I was wasting a lot of time following the new links more than once. I wanted to switch to an aggregator. I didn’t like Amphetadesk, because I didn’t like being forced to sort by “channel” rather than reading in reverse-chronological order. I am now playing a little with Pyblagg, which is a very simple aggregator that does its job well (and is easily tweaked).

But I now have the opposite problem. Many of those who do not ping weblogs.com, and therefore tend to go unread, provide some form of XML feed, but many of those who ping do not. Of course, there is something of an overlap, notably the Moveable Type folks who, by default, both ping and syndicate. Others do to, but there is a significant chunk who do not provide feeds.

Strangely, my reading habits change significantly depending on whether I lean toward my blogroll or my aggregator. Many of these sites–Seb‘s, Sam‘s, BoingBoing, etc.–do both, but many do not. Perhaps this gap will close as more people begin seeing the value in syndication and trackbacks (in whatever form), and they appear in more mature blogging platforms. For now, though, it is standards rather than propinquity of ideas that seems to influence the terrain of blog space.

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