Many fields of endeavor are changing rapidly. Many are undergoing radical shifts that come from a direction that you would never have thought of such as the iPod's potential influence on radio. How do you see what is going on early? How do you keep up?
How do you follow these trends now? The first sense of the new comes from the 'Sphere. So those of us in the 'sphere tend to use rss and aggregators. If you are like me, you have an aggregator like Bloglines. My problem is time. My aggregator fills up with so many names that I then have to pare them back. My aggregator also does not easily tell me about new names who are now making a difference.
Some of you have created group blogs such as Corante or the new Skype Journal. These are excellent especially for technical matters like Skype where the Journal becomes the organic user manual and customer feedback tool to Skype
One of the problems for the group blog is for the writer. You got to be an expert on your own blog - Will you want to split your energy between your main blog and the group? How much energy do you have? Blogging twice can be a chore. The group blog also tends not to expand its membership because that takes a lot of energy too. With a static membership, the group blog can miss important tangents that may grow to scale.
My partner Jevon MacDonald is offering us an easier way. A filter ecology.
Our plan is to find a field that is moving because of blogs - in this case Marketing.
Our process is to set up an initial filter using names in the field that we like a lot but with the intent that the field itself will find new names to add and that the group itself will find the filter useful as they now only go to one place to see all their colleagues. Now if you want to see how Seth links with Hugh and Hugh with Johnnie and Johnnie with Jennifer and so on - you only have to go to one place - Marketing Filter
Please have a look. For locals on PEI - it is son of City Filter.
