Dawn Douglass sent this note to Scoble and me, in the hopes that she’d receive responses from our readership. She’s seeking something more top-level than categories – but I don’t think there is such a thing? When you subscribe to a feed, you’re subscribing to a magazine – but a blog, in many ways, is better than a magazine. By limiting your subscription’s scope, you’re ruling out serindipity. Moreover, I’ve seen people promote categorized feeds and ultimately push users back to a single feed for any given site.

She writes:

I’d like something added to the blogosphere and wonder if either of you would be interested in throwing the idea out to your readers so that it might actually get adopted at some point…

For a long time, I’ve wished I could subscribe to one or more particular “hats” worn by a blogger, rather than getting every single post. For example, I read Fred Wilson’s blog, but wind up ignoring more than half of it, because his second main hat is “music lover,” something I’m not interested in.

For MyFridj, I’ve asked users what hat they are wearing when they post “Fridj Notes,” which are very similar to blog posts (…the point of which are to give raw material to comic writers. If something a user writes inspires a cartoon, then the writer will be the first to get a copy of it and an acknowledgment link back to their MyFridj page will accompany the cartoon.) I wish the blogosphere could do the same and assign blog hats, too.

I know there are tags and categories, but this would be a more top level sort. The point is that there would be different RSS feeds for the different hats you want to put on. And maybe even some sort of toggle so that you could go to a blog and hit which hat you want to read and see only those posts and comments and archives related to it.

Now that I’ve just started my own blog, I want this even more than when I was just a reader. I’m a devout Catholic and would like to write extensively about Catholicism, but what does it have to do with cartooning? I’d also like to write about education. Most of the people who were there for one topic don’t give a care about the others. I don’t want to have to keep two or three different blogs.

I do understand that blogging is about bringing your whole self to something, and I like that both of you guys write about your family life, etc. I think that’s a great aspect about blogging, and I wouldn’t want that to end (posts like that could be for “all hats”), but at the same time, if I’m reading a blogger because of Subject A, but he covers Subject B just as often, it wastes time and can cause annoyance. And for someone like me who is just starting to blog and already has people taking my feed because of my business…how do I now start throwing in posts about religion without most of them leaving?

Surely I’m not the only one who feels this way, am I? Seems to me “blog hats” is a natural idea that a lot of people would appreciate.

Better than a Magazine Subscription?