Introducing the Community Feed experiment

We are now launching a new reader appreciation experiment, the "Community Feed". The goal of this is to spotlight the latest updates from the photography-themed websites and blogs of our readers. Everyone is welcome to join as long as their photography-blogs are within the guidelines below.

The main focus of the Community feed are websites and blogs of photographers that mainly talk about photography, share their pictures, or share tips, techniques, and ideas. This is open to blogs old and new, big or small, just-getting-started photographers or grizzled veterans.

Since we already feature lots of camera news, reviews, rumors and tech-talk on the blog, it would defeat the purpose of this if we included them in the "Community" feed as well. So we will not feature any websites/blogs that primarily cover camera news, reviews, rumors, tech/camera talk.

Not good matches for the Community feed
+ reviews, news, rumors, heavy tech/gear talk (eg this noisy blog)
+ manufacturers big and small
+ retailers big and small
+ high-volume mega-sites
+ quote-blogs, "copiers", MFAs, scrappers, etc

Where will the Community Feed be shown?
The Community Feed will be added to the left sidebar of this blog below the "Latest Posts" and it will look exactly like the "Latest Posts" in the left side-bar.

It will be shown on every page of this blog (main green blog), not just the front page.

You can see the list of Community Feed blogs at delicious.

Here is how the alpha version looks (screenshot crop):

How about pictures?
For picture streams, you can join the already-in-progress flickr pool powered by flickr. If you use a different photo-hosting service that offers a similar feature, please let us know and we'll try to make it available as well.

How to join
1. Have a website or blog with an RSS feed. If you needed a nudge to start a blog, maybe this can help tilt the scales ;-)
2. Send us an email using the web-based contact form with your blog/website or RSS feed.
3. We will add the blog to the list if it a good match as described above. This is not done automatically so it may take a few hours before you are added
4. Your latest headlines will be added to the pool and shown along with everyone else participating in the Community feed. We will show the ten most-recent items from the whole pool
5. You can contact us at any time to add/remove/change your blog.
*. If you have more than one website/blog, you can submit more than one, as long as each one is within the above guidelines and stands on its own
*. Please note that this feature requires RSS feeds in order to get the headlines. We cannot add a website that does not have a working RSS feed.

Update
The alpha version of the Community Feed has gone live! Not everyone is included yet because we are experiencing some technical issues with the way the dates are read in feeds from different feed sources. Unfortunately this is something new that we did not experience when we did our testing. We used the noisy blogs as the guinea pigs for the testing and because they all use feedburner, we didn't notice the above issues.

We have not found what causes the problems yet. We will try to figure out a solution, and if we can't, we'll let the affected blogs know.