Two years ago the Virginia Democratic Bloggers established a joint RSS reader that would enable anyone to scan all the Virginia Democratic blogs. The idea was that we would collectively attract a much larger audience that we could separately. By putting the blogdigger link on our blog rolls we promoted the reader. It worked, many, many more people began to read our blogs. It was a precursor to Local Lefty Blogs.
There is no reason this could not be duplicated. The high traffic liberal blogs have a Feedburner RSS reader that they jointly promote. There is an RSS reader for the Eschaton community, but since only a few of them link to it, it does not build their collective audience.
For my own convenience I put together an RSS reader for Democratic Black Bloggers. It consists of blogs I know about that are published by African Americans writing mostly about politics from a Democratic point of view. I don’t pretend that this RSS reader is definitive, it just gives the reader a general idea about black blogosphere.
There is no reason you couldn’t do the same thing for women bloggers, or any other group.
RSS readers based on topics would also be likely to attract audience. You could have an economics RSS reader, environmental RSS reader, labor RSS reader, etc.
Moreover, once RSS readers became popular bloggers could link to them rather than individual blogs, thus greatly increasing the reach of individual blogs.
I am puzzled that this has not been more widely exploited.
