I didn't want to comment on the whole who-owns-which-swiss-blogs-urls discussion, but here are my 2 cents anyway…

I was surprised to realize on Friday that the blog.ch OPML file was gone (I need it for the Top 100 list). I knew Matthias had some “trouble” with other new aggregators, so this wasn't totally unexpected and I don't want to further comment on if Matthias is right or wrong. But OTOH he never really stated under which conditions this OPML file was available, so you can't really blame the others for taking and using it :)

I have now again access to the OPML list again, but it's a pity it isn't available to everyone anymore as such projects like the top100 list are not possible anymore (or not possible with such a low entry barrier…)

Anyway, nothing new, everything said already, but I think the whole mess begs for a solution and here's my proposal:

Create a “aggregator-independent” Swiss Blog Directory.

It may be super simple for a start, but could grow on features with time. My basic idea is, that everyone subscribes and maintains his blog data at one central place. Those URLs are then republished under some CC license (as OPML or whatnot), so that everyone can use it (and do with the data whatever he wants).

Later one could add features like Blog Claim (like in technorati, to be sure it's your blog), category and language fields and maybe as much as important after these few days, under which terms you want to have your blog republished (commercial sites? Just title? Full Content?).

This way, the aggregators don't have to waste time on collecting the data and investigating at copyright issues, but have one nice source for all this and they can concentrate on implementing new exciting features instead of boring data mining :)

One other feature could be a central place for pinging when you publish a new blog post, so that your article is immediately published on the aggregators as well. As far as I know, no aggregator supports that feature today, but having a single place for swiss blogs (like weblogs.com for everyone in the world) could solve some scalability issues…

I know Matthias did put a lot of work into his list and it's not that easy to keep it clean and up to date. I don't want to check each new entry, but with some kind of community check, false and spam entries could be spotted quite efficiently,.

Again, this list wouldn't be an aggregator itself, it would just publish the blog url list and maybe check from time to time, if the blog is still online. And all the data published for each blog is in the responsibility of the blog owner and not some single group or person. There have to be criteria on who's allowed to be on the list at all, but I think, those should be quite lax. The aggregator people still can exclude blogs they don't like from that list on their own and for example only use blogs from one language or category.

Just an idea, not sure if anyone's interested at all for something like this, but I think, it's a win for everyone, especially also for the blog owners, as they don't have to submit their blog on dozens of pages to be included (if they want to :) )