metablogging

what do you call a blog that's about blogs? i've decided to call it metablogging.

firefox and word 2003 both red-squiggly-underline metablogging, so it's possible that it's a new word, or atleast not mainstream yet. i'm crossing my fingers and hoping it gets famous (if not popular as an activity).

to be fair, metablogging has been around since very long, but in a slightly different sense. i've read quite a few blogs where people without the talent/motivation (imho) to add some value of their own, just paste other interesting posts and make a blog out of it, occasionally without giving proper credit too. still, i guess that's not exactly a metablog, as their blog isn't *about* other blogs, it's just *composed of* other blogs.

metablogging on the other hand is at one higher level of abstraction/indirection than blogging (sorry, couldn't skip the programmer jargon for want of better terms).

now i have not really seen a lot of metablogs (though i admit i'm not all that well read, being a very late starter in the blogosphere), but i think it's a concept that can catch on. take my case, for example. i've been subscribing to around 1 new blog a week, for the past 4 months. google reader does a nice job of managing my subscriptions for me, but i'm guessing i'm gonna need something more than just a "new item" highlight and their trends section very soon.

it happened to my gmail - my inbox is too huge for me to manage without labels. right now, the only mails that come into my inbox proper are the ones that don't already have any labels automatically applied. the moment they reach a critical mass, i try and think up a filter and make a label, freeing up my inbox again.

so how does metablogging come into the picture? i think, over time, people will be so overloaded with blogs, that they would rather rely on someone's metablog than read 10 posts of a blog to check whether it's worth subscribing to. we already have sites moving in that direction (technorati et al - i've not used too many of them, but i know they exist). i predict that sometime soon, there will be some sort of a specification or atleast loose standard for metablogs (the way it happened for feeds). if you want to ride the crest of this new wave, here's your cue.

happy metablogging!