Some time ago I proposed A feature for Personal Nodelet. The rationale for this idea you'll find in the thread. Here I'd like to add one more - by counting how many people have a given node in their Personal Nodelet we could have some alternative Best Nodes classification. The advantage of this schema is that it's based on a more natural and objective measure - the number of how many threads of discussion one can and want to follow.

Since I don't think this will be developed in the PM engine - I've started to code my own mechanism for checking web pages, something like active bookmarks - a list of web pages that actively check if there is new content on any of them. The application is nearly written and this weekend I'll post a link to my personal web server for those that would try to check it. I code it as a general as possible - but I'll add some Perl Monks extensions - like downloading pages from thepen instead of the live database. Is anyone interested?

By the way is there an XML ticker for Personal Nodelets? I would like to have this as an alternative mechanism for filling my database.