One of the interesting things I came across recently was Robert Scoble's impromptu video interview of Fred Wilson where they were discussing current and near term web trends.

Aside from real time information, the thing that struck me was actually a neat little web2.0 widget that Fred mentioned from his own blog, which I read regularly but had not noticed, called Blogrollr.
Now, rather than have a typical static blog roll that you have to keep updating, Fred asked the audience on his forum whether anyone knew of a more dynamic solution that shared with his readers what he was reading.  Up came the suggestion of Blogrollr and so I thought it was time to try it out on this blog, which has a lot of medical content and see what emerged.

This was the result after I set mine up yesterday and let it run for a day to see what I actually browse:

You can let it record all RSS feeds, but I chose to select Technorati registered sites, which would mean blogs rather than any website.  The reason for this is that I do a fair bit of competitive intelligence and confidential research for Pharma clients, so it would not be appropriate to reveal that information publicly.

The biggest problem I've experienced so far was clicking on a single item for some blogs in my Google Reader and the widget displayed the last 20 or 30 items, whereas in reality, I only clicked on the home page of the blog and exited after reading the most recent post.  A little disconcerting perhaps, as was finding that some corporates had clearly registered their websites, so they were unfortunately showing up along with the blogs I did want to see displayed.  I may need to do a little tweaking, but will try it and see how it goes.

My hope is that the Blogrollr will be a living breathing record of what I browse and change over time.  It will be interesting to see how the longitudinal analysis works out.  At the moment, you can see the widget in this blog post above, but I hope to have it up in the left margin this week once I have figured out how to do that in Typepad.  Whether it will be useful or not, I'm not sure yet, providing I can hide websites and only show blogs, I'll be happy.

What do you think? Anyone else using it?

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