Decentralizing the Ecosystem

Yesterday N.Z. Bear floated the idea of breaking up his Ecosystem into smaller communities:

Here’s the vision: I’d like to see other Ecosystems created, each focusing on their own particular community within the weblog world. Perhaps there could be an Ecosystem for U.S. military bloggers; an Ecosystem for political conservatives (or liberals); an Ecosystem for bloggers writing in Portuguese. Wherever a community of interest exits in the Blogosphere, there might be an Ecosystem for it.
Some might argue that this would contribute to a fragmenting effect in the Blogosphere; isolating communities so that they only communicate internally among themselves. But I think the effect would be the opposite. By providing a focus and nexus for blog communities, I think such Ecosystems would make it easier for outsiders to understand them and sample the work of their bloggers. I know that I’d personally be more likely to genuinely spend time browsing through the blogs of the kinds of communities I note above if there was an easier way to find the most well-regarded bloggers working within them.
. . .
So, I am considering turning the Ecosystem code base into an open source effort, and inviting other bloggers to take up the mantle of running their own, individual versions of the Ecosystem, tailored to focus on the needs of their own communities. Each Ecosystem would be completely self-contained and independent, but they would all rely upon the same open-source code base, to which I will continue contributing — and others would be encouraged to enhance and modify as well. And each Ecosystem could also use the peripheral features I’ve implemented over time, such as the New Weblog Showcase, to further highlight the work within their own communities. Looking into the longer term, perhaps methods could be developed to share data between Ecosystems — the most obvious application of which might be to create a mega-Ecosystem that rolls up data from all of them.

In this region we already have a quasi-Ecosystem with the Rocky Top Brigade. True, it doesn’t (yet) have the computer coding in place to rank blogs. But Volunteer bloggers enjoy many other benefits of being part of a smaller community.
We also have a number of prominent blogs. According to my quick glance through the Blogosphere Ecosystem (undoubtedly I missed some), the RTB has:

1 Higher Being
3 Playful Primates
8 Large Mammals
4 Marauding Marsupials
7 Adorable Rodents
6 Flappy Birds
8 Slithering Reptiles
4 Crawly Amphibians
1 Flippery Fish

Not bad.