Ben Hammersley has put together a cool egoboo tracker for authors, culling data from Amazon, Technoratti, AllConsuming, and others (by way of Cory Doctorow). It is an interesting way to re-combine information.

Unfortunately, the Auctorial Ego Tracker is somewhat slow due to the fact that it assembles the source data in real-time. But it got me thinking about the use of web resources. As real-time meaning aggregators gain in popularity, they will begin to put a much heavier load on web services as well as web servers simply hosting RDF and XML files. If open source applications and useage practices are not developed to distribute the load, the power (and necessity) of well-funded intermediary services such as Google will continue to grow.

It is not surprising that one leading discussion among bloggers concerns the inefficient and potentially overwhelming consumption of RSS feeds. William Grosso's Sunday Afternoon Thoughts on the Design of RSS Aggregators does a good job of explaining this problem and offering solutions.

Some recent approaches to addressing interaction limitations actually borrow ideas from the internet, usenet, and web build-out, including pDNS and RSS over BitTorrent. There is also an interesting discussion on www-rdf-interest about distributing RDF queries.

On a related note, I have recently been sketching out how a small web community might maintain some sort of RDF cache / router / query platform to buffer the interaction between its members and the greater semantic web.