The gist of Bloggers as Filters is the act or process of using bloggers to filter the cream of the crop (relevant to the user of the aggregator who has subscribed to a certain subset of blogs) from the frantic news-generating and collecting machines such as Yahoo!, Wired, other bloggers, etc. such that one needn't subscribe to the actual news-generators/mass-link-collectors. Why not do both?
What I am thinking is that you open up your aggregator, and it has gone through and preened out all of the different links that have been linked from in the entries you have aggregated. You can open up a little summary window and see that 8 of the bloggers you subscribe to have linked to one particular story; 6 have linked to this other story; 3 have linked to this yet another story. Basically, just a way to bubble up oft-linked to news-articles/blog-entries. Obviously, an entry that is linked to and is actually in an RSS feed you subscribe to gets a bonus boost.
In practice, let's say you subscribe to 6 blogs:
On one particular day, all 6 of them link to some random Yahoo! news story; 4 of them link to some other story; and 2 of them link another person's blog entry. Your aggregator peers through all of the RSS feeds and provides a ranked summary of these links. You get to see the most oft-linked-to sites of the day based on your personal RSS subscriptions.
Would I use this? Probably not. I would play with this feature of an aggregator for a day or so, and then I would forget about it. But, it's been a long day at work mucking with various Kerberos/Apache 2.0 settings; and I had nothing else to write about.
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