Feedburner is testing Blog Network Feed Aggregation using FeedBurner RSS Feeds.

"Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category. See this feed for the venture capital group as an example (which, by the way, I just subscribed to), which lists all of the posts from every blog in the network.

The Blog Networks I am part of (Know More Media and Syntagma) function more like a "hive" mind than a "focused lens".  I think that’s fine, esp if you want to focus the "hive", as I suggested in my recent podcast on Zoom-In (you need iTunes to download and listen to it - it’s not an MP3 file) but focusing the "hive mind" is not that easy to do - and it’s also not a focused experience for Advertisers. 

What FeedBurner is trying to do is become the Blog Network of similar feeds by theme - offloading the actual selection work to individuals who administer a feed network - sorta the "Open Directory of RSS Feeds", hosted by Feedburner.  It’s a good idea.   According to TechCrunch:

"The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control - in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience."

What’s needed, i feel, is an internal ranking algo - sorta a FeedBurner Mini Search Engine that ranks each blog in the Blog Network by Keyword and Content relevance.  Also - FeedBurner might need to disqualify any selected site in the feed network that does not actually contain any of the content it’s supposed to - in other words, FeedBurner would need to ‘monitor the feed network administrators" choices of what’s included - a big job - certainly enough for one or two people to do as a full time job.

You have to wonder if FeedBurner is thinking it through all the way - maybe all they care about is aggregating the feeds and generating revenue that way - and letting the admins worry about the rest of it - typical Web 2.0 Mentality - if that’s the case.

As also pointed out - the rollout of FeedBurner Networks next month is only partial - the full update is not slated till the end of the year and might have some of the features that are still going to be lacking in the September release - we’ll have to wait and see.

‘The guys at FeedBurner have a lot of other ideas about this which they’ll roll out in phase 2 of the Network product at the end of the year.  For now, we’re testing a few networks – Venture Capital being one of them – and would love any and all feedback subscribers and publishers have.