Syndication really is the future of weblogs. I didn’t believe it until just now. I stumbled across the Planet model of weblog aggregation and I can see a lot of promise. Especially for the “vortal” business model of blogs (a la Weblogs, Inc.) and for topic-specific sites such as Planet Apache.

I love the idea of a site like Planet Apache. In theory, it should aggregate all of the blog entries by a bunch of experts writing about Apache on his or her weblog in one place. But the reality is that all of the blog entries on a site need to be about Apache in order for the content to remain focused. Who wants to dedicate a weblog to Apache? Anyone? Any takers? That’s right. Nobody’s going to do it. So instead of reading a bunch of information about Apache on Apache Planet, I have to read through entries about how much bloggin sucks or whatever. Cool for them, but not so cool for me.

So the next function that all weblogging software is going to need is the ability to generate “dynamic” subscription feeds (Atom, RSS, whatever). Every entry on my site might not always be appropriate for a given planet, but certain topics may be useful. Rather than a setting up a new weblog for every topic, my tools should just add my topic-specific entries to a unique or parsable feed that can then contribute my words to the fray. I’m not sure if everyone wants a billion different feeds for their site, so the logic may have to be on the aggregator side.

Is this already happening? I haven’t really monkied around with the feeds enough to know if “Topic” or “Category” is already part of the syndication formats.