Brian continues thinking about aggregators in Aggregation Control Spectrum. He suggests a thought exercise, wondering how to combine classic aggregation with web feed search tools.
My thinking has been that my aggregator needs to do a much better job of understanding what type of feed I have. Specifically, if I have a search feed (Findory, Technorati, PubSub, Waypath, Feedster, Blogdigger, etc), my aggregator should be smart enough to ignore items that already come to me via my other feeds. If I get the item in my web feed download, it should skip the item in a search feed.
I would also like my aggregator to be smart enough to group items together that are all talking about the same thing. Aggregators like RSSBandit and SharpReader do this by showing threads of conversation, so I can "unfold" a thread and read referring items in my web feeds. These tend to be limited by what is in my web feeds, but what if two bloggers in my feeds refer to a third item that is not in my feeds? I'd like to easily see that there is a shared URL within my feeds.
Maybe we should chat at the cafe sometime, Brian.