Internet Topic Exchange and Austin Blog Demo

Phillip Pearson just posted the first version of the Internet Topic Exchange, a very cool service that enables the creation of composite blogs out of trackback pings.
A few weeks ago, Chip suggested creating a composite Austin blog to cover Austin politics, following the Peterme conversation on city blogs. We could cover other topics in addition to politics — music, restaurants, etc.
There’s already an AustinBloggers site, which has several authors. But that requires individuals to post directly to that blog. This is a different idea — post to your very own blog, and the AustinBlog will aggregate your Austin-related posts.
I created a demo site, here which has some of my Austin posts from recent months.
All we need to do to post to the blog would be to add this trackback to the posts on our own blogs about Austin. http://topicexchange.com/t/austin_blog/
The resulting content will be available as an RSS feed, which we could pull into a standalone MovableType-based blog (for example, and if I get the RSS plug-in working correctly). This could be formatted more nicely than the native wiki format.
People who don’t use trackback can enter their URL in a web form here or use the MT trackback server (not sure how that works yet.)
I’m travelling this week, so I can’t work on a standalone aggregate blog until next week.
I sent an email to everyone I remember participating in the AustinBlog conversation over the last few weeks. Others are welcome to to the party.