Stephen Baker at Blogspotting chatted with Mark Fletcher about Bloglines' grand designs on mediating your experience of the blogosphere:

The CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. "The challenge," he says, "is to create world-class blog search, which we don't think exists now."

Of course, lots of companies, big and small, are chasing that vision. Fletcher says that with improved search, Bloglines will lead users to the relevant blogs, and then help them organize all the feeds pouring onto their desktop. He sees the technology automatically grouping the feeds, or perhaps ranking them according to the user's interests (as documented by clicks).

A seemingly virtuous cycle, where the benevolent Bloglines manages your feeds, aggregates them, organizes them based on popularity (click counting), and helps you on your daily romp through the blogosphere. Hmmm.

Personally, I would rather rely on the opinions of specific individuals, who I know and trust, rather than disembodied popularity-based mouseclick algorithms. The Syndisphere, as Dan Gillmor styles it.

AskJeeves has started to destroy the soul of Bloglines.

Stephen asked if he should stress other angles in the story: yes, Stephen, think about the fact that people need to remain foremost in social media, not the machinery. If Bloglines wants to support a ranking of stuff I might like to read based on what my friends are reading, cool. But Big Media type aggregation of millions of whathsinames out there doesn't interest me at all.

[tags: Mark Fletcher, Bloglines, social+media, blogging, RSS+feeds]