Regular readers know I'm a fan of both PubSub and baseball (alright, I don't talk about the latter a lot, since none of my TV channels show any games). PubSub lets you subscribe to feeds of searches that match 'on-the-fly', that is, once someone writes about something you're interested in, it matches against a search, and pings you either by RSS or—okay, RSS is the way that the overwhelming majority of people using PubSub get their notifications. PubSub is theoretically faster than Technorati because the former matches posts to your search where the latter matches searches to a database. (I say theoretically because PubSub doesn't have the instant gratification and pretty website that Technorati has. PubSub over IM would kill, by the way, but Adium—for example—doesn't yet support Publish-Subscribe.) Today PubSub announced PubSub Baseball, which pre-defined feeds for all the Major League Baseball teams including all of their players. See the Toronto Blue Jays page as an example.

I'd be interested to know if they account for trades during the season for what if Eric Hinske gets traded to the Cleveland Indians? Do both the Cleveland Indians and Toronto Blue Jays pages get updated? If so, the OPML feeds would work great as 'reading lists' for individual teams, as any player that gets traded gets removed automatically from the list of players I follow and new players get added automatically. It can happen automatically and immediately after the trade because I would find out about the trade via the team's main feed.

It's a great demonstration of a way to create, for example, a group of feeds that follows everything about an organization, that organization being anything from a small startup to a medium-size non-profit to a heartless, multinational corporation. Spam is a major problem—for all services, not just PubSub—and especially so with things that cost money. (I found this with books and music albums I was tracking, as stores would feed in RSS to all the services knowing that people like me would syndicate them on their sites and increase their search engine ranking.) Reading lists seem like a really great idea, if not so much to decrease the amount of information that comes in (hypothesis: most attempts to reduce the amount of information coming not only fail but make the problem worse) but to let subject-area experts handle the creation and maintenance of feeds of writing and video and audio that help the reader better understand that field. There is no doubt the political problem of what goes in and what stays out, but since it's should, in the near future, be fairly easy to create your own reading list, if you don't like what one person is doing, other than time and energy there's no reason you couldn't start your own.