File this under: don’t miss it until it’s gone. Rabble’s Indyblogs is an aggregator of syndication feeds from bloggers who are associated with Indymedia. Over the six months or so that it’s been around, it’s become one of my favorite websites, giving me great one-stop-shopping for a pile of great blogs written by smart indymedia activists.
Now Indyblogs has been down for a few days due to a hard drive crash at protest.net, which hosts the site, and I feel like a junkie needing a fix. Sure, I can visit all of the sites individually, and I’ve got many of them in my aggregator, but it’s just not as convenient. Plus, Indyblogs let’s me see important indymedia news filter across the network, getting processed and elaborated. Last week, when the FBI seized IMC server hard drives, I learned a lot about the story quickly from the bloggers on Indyblogs, several of whom are Indymedia techs with intimate knowlege of IMC’s server infrastructure.
I’m pretty certain many of my fellow Indybloggers also rely on this service, which creates a sort of metaconversation on topics of interest. But because all the Indybloggers are independent thinkers and writers, it doesn’t turn into the echo chamber that characterizes much of the blogosphere.
It’s good to know that blog tools, such as RSS syndication, aren’t just hip-cred for the blog elite, but are actually useful catalysts for communication.