In the past few days, I've discovered several "real" blogs (i.e., not LiveJournal, angsty-type jobs) run by college kids. I think they each provide valuable content for their target niche and provide a younger perspective on their chosen topics. Here they are:
- Student PR by Chris Clarke of Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, Canada
- College v2 by Sean Blanda of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.
- College Startup by Ben Bleikamp of The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.
I don't think I've ever come across so many college bloggers in such a short time, and I'm astounded by it. While I have by no means contacted these guys about starting or joining some kind of network, Sean of College v2 has already taken steps to starting such a network.
On a side note, I also need to stop breaking the cardinal rule of blogging and put up an About page before I actually finish college.
Technorati Tags: college, university, bloggers, students, networks
Dave Winer's Share Your OPML has opened up to the public last night/today. I've posted my OPML file with all 70 of my RSS feeds there. A quick count shows that only 19 or so of my feeds are in the top 100, so I'm getting a broad view of the blogosphere and not just reading the A-listers. Also, I thought 70 was a relatively large number, but the most prolific subscribers on the site subscribe to 269-2549 feeds (eliminating the #1 podfeed.net, which I don't think is a real person).
I'd be interested to know how the "Subscriptions Like Mine" algorithm works. My top match is Pete Gilbert with a strength of 14.025. It then jumps to 5 points and lower.
I had to export my OPML from NetNewsWire a couple of times before I got it right. For those using NNW, if you're going to export a selection, don't select folders and feeds in those folders or you'll get duplicate feeds in your file. You need to select one or the other. Also, you're going to want to export the file as "OPML (flat)" instead of "OPML (with groups)".
Technorati Tags: Share Your OPML, SYO, OPML, feeds, RSS, XML, Dave Winer, Scripting News, NetNewsWire, sharing, Web 2.0
From the LyricWiki site:
LyricWiki is a free site which is a single source where anyone can go to get reliable lyrics for any song from any artist without being hammered by invasive ads.
This is a great alternative to having to visit those bulky sites riddled with ads, popups and flash when you want to know the lyrics to a song you're listening to. Best of all, anyone can contribute lyrics so even if you do have to visit one of those awful sites, you can add the lyrics to the Wiki so no one else has to go through the same trouble.
They have a Firefox search plug in, but I hope that in time their Google Juice gets high enough so that anytime you search "'song name' lyrics" in Google, you get them instead of the bad guys as the top result.
Technorati Tags: LyricWiki, lyrics, Wiki, song, music, Google, Google Juice, Firefox, search, plugin
Steve Rubel declared that today would be RSS Appreciation Day and he's got a handy tutorial for using RSS with Google Personalized Home Page. While it may not be much use to the technophiles, it's a great thing to share with your friends and family who may not be as tech savvy.
On a side note, my biggest complaint about Google Personalized Home Page (aside from the ridiculously long name) and what's kept My Yahoo as my home page for far too long, is that the three columns are the same width. I much prefer My Yahoo's approach with the main column taking up twice as much space as the two side columns. Still, My Yahoo can't touch GPHP's cleanliness; boy is My Yahoo ugly.
Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, Google Personalized Home Page, Steve Rubel, RSS, RSS Appreciation Day, tutorial, feeds, syndication
The folks at I Blogged This have an extensive roundup of all the Ruby on Rails resources available on the Net. Hopefully I'll find something I haven't seen yet!
Technorati Tags: Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Rails, framework, Web 2.0, API
Orangoo is a nifty little AJAX-enabled online spell checker I found last night. It appeared on Digg today so I figured it is worth a mention. As usual, give me an API so I can integrate it into other web apps.
Technorati Tags: spell check, language, AJAX, Orangoo, spelling, international, API
Marc Dominus over at The Universe of Discourse has done some research into the history of the equal sign. Part of the reason a pair of parallel lines was chosen was "because no 2 things can be more equal." The entry also mentions the origin of a two other diacritical marks, ˜ (tilde) and ¨ (umlaut), which evolved from the letters "n" and "e", respectively. Very fascinating stuff.
I only stumbled across this entry a few minutes ago, but the rest of his blog looks equally interesting as well.
Technorati Tags: math, equals, letters, history, etymology, characters, Universe of Discourse
I saw a link to this in my referrer logs…
PennTags is the University of Pennsylvania Library's social bookmarking tool. I haven't added anything yet, but at first glance, it looks a lot like del.icio.us.
It has a feature called projects, which are basically folders for those who aren't folsonomified yet. There also all the goodies you'd expect from commercial social bookmarking sites, such as RSS feeds for everything, bookmarklets and even a Firefox toolbar (for bookmarking and other library tools).
This is the first I've heard of this, but a quick Google search reveals that this is at least 4 months old. I'll be the first to admit I don't spend much time at the libary (Whartonites are averse to any text not in Excel), but this is the first I've heard of it so they haven't done a good job of advertising it.
Technorati Tags: PennTags, UPenn, Penn, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, education, library, social bookmarking, del.icio.us, web 2.0, folksonomies
Here's a site listing the top 87 worst predictions about the future. This list just goes to show that one shouldn't make bold statements, lest they end up on some two-bit website that offers "Sexy Singles in Philadelphia" and serve as fodder for some bored college student or employee to ridicule over lunch.
Technorati Tags: funny, predictions, future, lists
