Weblogs.com Now Offers "Categories," Including RSS

Dave Winer has updated weblog tracker Weblogs.com. Now Weblog users who "ping" the site have the option of including a category into which their Weblog should be included. There are two categories: Europe (for European Weblogs, natch) and RSS, for RSS feeds.

Dave will separate blogs with Europe and RSS categories into their own pages. These will act like the front page of Weblogs.com, displaying a list of recently-updated Web logs. Here are the HTML versions of each page:

Europe Category -- http://www.weblogs.com/europe.html
RSS Category -- http://www.weblogs.com/rss.html

(You can get links to the XML page versions and more information about the whole category thing at http://discuss.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$44.)

As you may remember from my last story about Weblogs.com ( www.researchbuzz.com/news/2001/oct25oct3101.html#weblogscomturns ) Weblogs.com no longer automatically checks 'blogs every hour for changes. You know have to use one of several different "ping" methods to let Weblogs.com know your site has changed (and to pass along category information.)

For us non-geeks, that probably means using the ping form on Weblogs.com: http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm . Unfortunately Dave has not yet updated the ping form to include category options. There are other ways to ping the site -- they're listed at http://newhome.weblogs.com/directory/11/implementations -- and I suspect that Dave will soon update his ping form.

I'm stoked about this new feature; I suspect RSS search engines like http://www.assimilatethe.net/will be able to use an XML file of recently-updated RSS feeds much like Daypop is using the current Weblogs.com update XML file. Exciting stuff.

Posted to Internet-Technology-RSS