What if I want to know this much...

I floated an idea, still wondering about its soundness. One part, hmmm; two parts huh?

I thought about what Google could offer in the way of serving me up the blogs I read most frequently--likeley a subset of my blogroll--on my m-blogging device (currently a t-mobile sidekick). Now, there are a couple of things about reading and blogging remotely. First of all, when blogrolls are on the left hand side, you have to scroll through a long list of blogs to get down to the first post. That's how it works on my sidekick--I don't know how it works for others. I want the posts--I want the meat--first.

In just learining about RSS and news aggregators, I admit to being behind the curve on that stuff. So maybe some of this is already possible. But what I'd like is my own customizable Google home page/portal for my sidekick where the latest few posts (in part) of the blogs I've indicated I want to read daily (through some gadget/selection device probably) are on a single page, scrollable, and then I can click [more] if I want to catch up with someone's latest posts, or just keep scrolling until something catches my interest. This would be cool because when you're mobile even more so than tethered, every click counts; every download counts. They take time.

The other idea, building on that, would be... okay it gets kind of dicey here... What if I could tell google to deliver me the ten blogs out of a group of 40 on my blogroll I read every day, and to get those 10 blogs as a subset of the 40, I can specify keywords I'm looking for.

Keywords can be general across blogs (technology, sex, law), or they can--more useful I think--get pretty specific within blogs. Maybe I only want to read Dave Winer when he's talking about "Google," "Harvard," or "War" in recent posts. Maybe I only want to read Shelley when certain keywords are not present in her posts, like "RDF," "RSS," and "Dave Winer." These topics are wonderful resources for other blog readers, for whom these keywords would be a perfect fit. But for me, I'd probably skip those posts, or maybe would want a way to click on them and save them on a subpage for "weekend reading" or something like that. At the same time, I DO want Shelley in my top 10 daily reads when she's writing about "writing" and "men" or whenever she posts one of her photographs. If we're talking RSS, then I want to have more time to drill down--a kind of easily accessible save-as for later among, perhaps, four or five other "save-as" posts from across blogs.

Too tired to think more. Okay--lemme have it...

Google Should Buy YACCS Too.

Posts are only part of the blog conversation. There's probably a ratio somewhere that contrasts on average how many comments there are to each blog post.

In some cases--more often than I'd like to admit on my own blog--the witty, flirtatious, insightful, and sometimes irritating words within comments are better, more engaging, and more enjoyable than the original post.

That's why I think Google should pay some quick attention to the back-half of blogging, which are those post aftershocks known as comments. Whether they build a commenting service that hooks into Blogger or buy YACCS or a similar service, I hope they don't neglect this important and generally cumbersome part of our blogging experience.