Seb Paquet has posted some interesting ideas about self-organizing blog directories. He cooks up a distributed solution in which GeoURLish "badges" would visibly (and semantically) designate a blogger as a member of a particular academic community.

I definitely like the badge idea. The badge should link to a local RDF file designating community afiliation, with additional data appertaining to that affiliation. Categorization schemes on the part of search engines have loosened the dependency on directories, and self-categorization is becoming the norm as web developers get accustomed to the process of generating RSS and other metadata.

Community centers, blog planets, and leading bloggers will be the primary driving force in popularizing these badges, and in organizing the category sets used in the population of blog directories. I think that developing tools for these sites to create badges and organize the harvesting of participant data is more important than tools for the blogs themselves. Early adopters will simply copy and manually modify the RDF of the leaders as it happened with FOAF.

Mr. Paquet also set up a wiki page and a TE channel to track this conversation.