LazyWeb and RSS: aggregating and distributing feature requests

Clay Shirky discusses LazyWeb in LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too?. LazyWeb is a site where people can post (or point to posts) describing feature needs. The idea being, collect wishes together and someone, somewhere might say "Hey, I can fix that". The crux of Shirky's article is that RSS can help scale the Lazyweb notion by helping distribute requests to multiple sites, as well as aggregate requests in one place. At the end he asks:

Will it work? Who knows. Like any experiment, it could die from inactivity. It could also be swamped by a flood of low-quality submissions. It may be that the membrane that a weblog forms around its readers is better for matching describers and developers than an open feed would be. And Paul Hammond has suggested that "Any attempt to invoke the LazyWeb directly will cause the whole thing to stop working."

It's worth trying, though, because the potential win is so large. If the benefits open source development offers for fixing bugs can be applied to creating features as well, it could confer a huge advantage on the development of Mob Software.

I'm turning off the feed

I'm turning off the feed of this site to epc.editthispage.com. That was the first "formal" weblog I tried to maintain (though I've had a number of webloggish personal sites in the past, most notably ibm.com/~epc (which itself is long gone, though available on archive.org). Unfortunately the site is far too slow and causes "Radio Userland" to hang. I've also noticed that categories and titles don't get reflected, and three sites is a bit much anyway.