PubSub Launches Community Lists

Steven at LibraryStuff has announced a new feature at PubSub: community lists. You can read about them at his blog: http://www.librarystuff.net/2005/11/pubsub-community-lists.html

You know PubSub, right? It's a great way to track posts in the blogosphere as well as press releases, newsgroup posts, SEC/EDGAR filings, and a bunch of other stuff. These new community lists, which you can check out at http://www.pubsub.com/lists/, are handbuilt lists that revolve around certain topics. The first four community lists are Law List, PR List, Librarian List, and Fashion List. (Fashion?)

The list includes a list of blogs relevant to a the particular category. In addition to that you can also see the blog's position on the popularity list, the change since the previous day, and a link to a page of statistics about the blog. You can see both links to/from the blog and the rank of the blog over time. (These stats are available in a feed if you want to keep up.)

The community lists themselves are available in an OPML file. So if you decide that you need to monitor PR, you could start by importing this OPML file and going through the top 50-ranked blogs with a fine-toothed comb for pointers and resources, and then at least looking at the other ones. This couldn't and shouldn't be a one-stop shop when you're trying to develop a data pool to monitor, but these lists, with their rankings and their statistics, make it really easy to generate a list of blogs from which to start.

Two complaints. First is that there aren't enough community lists. Duh. Second is that they might be a little too general. Could there be a way to break these down at all, even big goofy filters like everything hosted on an edu site, everything hosted on Blogger, everything offering a podcast, etc? These would be general enough and easily-determined enough that you wouldn't have to do a lot of work to break them out.

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