This morning I updated my last post, noting that Teresa Valdez Klein, of the Blog Business Summit, had posted a response to my review of Publish and Prosper: Blogging for your Business. Since she quoted from me, I will quote from her. She writes:

Seriously, though, this got me thinking a bit. I doubt that I use my RSS reader nearly as much as Ms. Klein, but I can certainly see how subscribing to a number of blogs can be overwhelming, especially if those blogs are updated several times a day! What's more, you may elect to subscribe to a particular blog because of a certain topic the blogger writes about. But what about all those posts that are entirely off topic? Do you really want to wade through all that material?

One solution that pops directly to my mind would be to subscribe to a particular category. Now I don't know about other types of blog engines, but I know that with blosxom this is super easy to do. Let's say you wanted to only subscribe to posts for the dESIGNER'S cLOISTER having to do with the topic of blogging. Just substitute the following URL for the regular feed:

http://www.hiland.com/blogs/mward/blog.2.cgi/design/blogging/index.rss

Once you do that, you'll only get posts that fall into this specific category! Chances are you could even subscribe to different category feeds simultaneously. This way you would only get the information you really want, rather than clogging up your RSS reader with irrelevant (though certainly still interesting) material coming in from more general feeds.

Like I said, I don't know how this type of RSS would work on other blog engines, or even if it would at all, but with this idea in mind I'm going to give some real thought to building this kind of functionality into this blog.

Any comments or suggestions on this topic?