Share Your OPML as an Alist

Posted on May 28, 2006

Michael Arrington, whose TechCrunch feed already tops Share Your OPML's Top 100 list, says that Share Your OMPL is "already a good blog ranking system, and over time it has the chance to become the definitive ranking and recommendation system for blogs."

But there's a real difference between what Share Your OPML is doing and other ranking systems. SYO is completely objective and shows exactly what content people are actually reading right now. Other ranking systems are either subjective, or forced to look at either different data (Technorati looks at links) or only data specific to their users (Bloglines ranks blogs based on subscriber numbers on Bloglines). Over time, SYO can become a true "long tail" recommendation engine if a wide swath of the users out there are willing to upload their OPML feed. And they are only a couple of steps away from being there.
SYO needs more users. My guess is a few thousand have already uploaded their reading lists, but it will take a lot more before the data is really reflective of what most people are reading. To do this, SYO needs to add more value than it currently does for users. New features have been rolling out over time that help do this. Since the last time I looked, SYO has added a top podcast list and a feed reader to the mix.

Share Your OPML is already another interesting blog Alist. However, it has very little chance of ever becoming the "definitive ranking and recommendation system for blogs." The first problem is that it is going to heavily skew towards tech blogs. SYO's Top 100 Feeds list is nearly all tech-related feeds as of this writing. SYO has very little chance of becoming a reliable blog ranking tool outside of the tech industry. So far only a minority of web users even use RSS and many of those that do are in tech bloggers themselves. An even smaller percentage of these RSS users are going to use a service like SYO. The second problem with SYO is how many people are actually going to upload their OPML file? A third problem is that people may upload an OPML file and then walk away from the service. It doesn't take very long for an OPML file to become stale. Reading habits change very quickly.