RSS feeds appeal to me not just as a useful medium for reading serialized content, but also as representative of a kind of “dumb” handling of data, the separation of content from presentation, modularity, all that stuff, which I just appreciate aesthetically. And as I found an increasing number of the sites I visit providing feeds, I wanted to take advantage of this to corral all my reading into an easy, one-stop repository.

But, when aggregating any significant number of feeds, the more frequently updated ones inevitably bury the others, the latter of whose content is probably more important because of its infrequency (see: kbps). So I was overjoyed when I noticed that Rojo accounts for this in several intelligent ways. First, it shuffles the most recent posts of all your feeds together toward the top of your “wire” (a fake term I’m using), allowing infrequent content to muscle its way to the surface and avoid being lost. Second, it keeps track of how users interact with all the articles it serves, whether they clicked on a link in it, or marked it as interesting, or bookmarked it, and pushes those articles closer to the top of your “stream” (a fake term I’m using).

Pretty cool, and I now can’t imagine the internet without Rojo.

On the horizon is a new service, Feeds 2.0, which promises to take this same idea further. Feeds 2.0 pays attention to the content of articles you tend to click on, taking into account both which feed they’re from and key words they contain, to deliver content that is more relevant to you specifically to the top of your “wire/stream” thing. Not only that, but it groups together articles that it determines to be about the same thing, so that those memes clogging up Boing Boing, Waxy, Digg, &c. can be easily compared and ignored.

Unfortunately, Feeds2 is only in private beta at this time, so if you’re interested I recommend signing up for an invitation. I signed up what feels like forever ago but was probably closer to six weeks, and I still haven’t heard anything. Suffice it to say I am trembling with anticipation.

Since graduating from college almost three years ago (Christ), I’ve really missed the convenience and fun of organized education. There are a million things I wish I knew more about, but that I don’t know where to start looking to learn: anthropology, sociology, literature, art history, psychology, more philosophy, more linguistics, math, physics… I’d love to go to college forever, collecting degrees in everything.

I’ve wondered for a long time whether there were any online curricula available to follow. Sure, some courses on some universities’ websites had publicly available syllabi, but not many. And those that do aren’t very thorough. I figured there must be tons of people like me who have banded together to create something better than this, like an online book club but with more focus.

I found out today that MIT is doing exactly this. They’ve come up with OpenCourseWare, which presents, in an amazingly organized fashion, all the material you need (or references to it) for a large number of classes. I don’t know where to start. Fortunately, now that I live so close to MIT, I’m sure I can get almost all of the necessary reading material at the library down the street, and, if all goes well, get started with one of these classes.

Also of interest is Wikiversity, which aims to offer a broad, free, online education via Wikibooks‘ open-content textbooks. Proposals are still being made, and the logistics of it are only roughly sketched at this point, but there seems to be a lot of excitement about the possibilities behind this framework.

I’m cursed with being both obsessive compulsive and dangerously apathetic, so I’m drawn to things like personal organizers, but never actually use them, even though I, of all people, should. The truth is that none of them really appealed to me; writing on paper is so bulky and difficult to edit, and because so much of my life is spent online, I really should use some kind of software. But most programs I’ve found have way too many features and/or cost money and/or take up too much memory to be able to run all the time, which would be necessary if I’m ever going to pay attention to the details of my life.

I played around with a simple html to do list that I kept as my home page, but literally for months I would just ignore it on my way to AllMusic or wherever. It was too inflexible.

Then wikis were created, and they seemed to be the ideal platform for personal organization. Unfortunately I lacked the knowledge it would require to implement wiki architecture in that way. But finally somebody’s done this for me with GTDTiddlyWiki. This is nothing more than a modified version of TiddlyWiki, but I use it because it looks nicer. It’s a little hard to understand how to use it initially, but it’s quickly become clear that it’s both flexible and light enough for my purposes. It resides as a single html file on your hard drive, your thumb drive, or wherever, and runs on CSS and JavaScript. It’s really beautiful.