Fred Wilson Wants A Streamroll

Fred Wilson once upon a time read a certain list of blogs religiously, and had a blogroll. When he stopped using RSS readers his blogroll got ‘stale’ — meaning that there were blogs in the roll that were not ones that he really read consistently. So he dropped the blogroll from his blog. Recently someone asked him to provide a list of what he’s reading — a blogroll all over again. This led to a small inspiration:

[from The Blogroll I Want For A VC]

Yesterday, I received an email from Allison Kellman. She asked:

Would you consider publishing a blogroll or a list of blogs you read often somewhere on your site? I’d love to know what you’re reading.

And without thinking, I wrote back:

The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother

Everything else is based on links I see on the web

I wish there was a last.fm for blogs

A last.fm for blogs! I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC.

If it exists, please send me the link and I’ll add it today. If it doesn’t, please someone build it and I’ll be your first user.

I commented:

A few thoughts:

1. Ambient News is a Firefox plugin that a/ watches what you read (browse) on the web, and b/ develops a page of recommendations for you as new posts/pieces emerge on those sites (it’s watching the RSS without you making a list). Ambient News opens in any new empty Firefox window. It’s conceivable that Atul Varma, the guy behind Ambient News, could be convinced to develop a ‘streamroll’ for Ambient News.
2. I use Snackr as a replacement for traditional RSS readers. It’s very different for a number of reasons: see http://bit.ly/Q7wtz. Most important, it brings back that serendipidy, since I can have hundreds and hundreds of feeds, but ignore 99% of everything that goes by.

The streamroll metaphor is much more apt than blogroll, these days.

What Fred and I want is a presentation of what we are reading — presumably the ones that we rate as interesting — and to provide that to our community in a usable form.

I am doing quite a lot of link posting these days (see /messagelinks and /groundlinks), but that is too time-consuming, and is not general enough.

A streamroll is a stream of what blogs, posts, and other sources you have been reading, served up to the community in some way or another, for example, as a widget on a blog. I am emulating a more well-defined product with my link blogs, others are emulating with bookmarking apts, but a real streamroll would involved much less work for the individual than either of these approaches.

A really good solution would include a merger of Snackr functionality — to stream in RSS feeds, and URLS pushed to me in Twitter and other social tools, and stream them past my attention — coupled with the ‘look-over-my-shoulder’ scrobbling that Ambient News does inside the browser. I could set thresholds or blacklists to filter in/out various sites, or I could ‘star’ pages as I read them and comment on them if I wanted to.

I hope someone actually builds a streamroller good enough to allow me to step back from manual linkblogging.