If you read your RSS feeds via Bloglines, as I do, you’ll know they’ve been doing more to make it an interactive web application than a straight click-here, load-another webpage type of traditional web application. AJAX is the technology they’re using to do this.

They’ve asked for Bloglines Freedback — a cute niche term that lets them search for blog posts that talk about them. So here’s mine.

I’m really satisfied with using bloglines. The most recent upgrade fixed the actions that caused page reloads for the left frame blog list. The fact that dynamically updates for marking pages as new and blog updates is awsome. Kudos.

The one feature that would really make bloglines better for me is the notion of a “read up to here” function. I have many blogs that I loosely follow, and by the time I go to skim them, there are 200 entries to read. I don’t have time to read that many, but because I’ve loaded the page, they’re all considered “read” and won’t show up again. If I want to see them again, I need to mark the “Keep new” box for each article, but that’s not practical. (Then, when I did read them, I’d need to check them off again.)

I guess that the reader Andrew uses (Feedonfeeds?) forces him to mark each article as read, instead of explicitly marking them as new. I’d like to hit a happy medium … bloglines to add a function that says “I’ve read this feed up to here.” I might mark that after reading the 10th post on a feed that has 90 posts, and when I load the screen again, I see the next 80 (plus whatever new ones are.) This isn’t an explicit keep as new, just an idea of where I stopped so I can start there next time.

Does that make sense? What do you think, Bloglines?

• Buxfer: Track Your Money
  Helps tracking splitting of bills and who owes what
  (tags: groupware budget bills)
• List of films that most frequently use the word fuck – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Tracks FPMs — “fucks per minute”. I honestly don’t know what people did before the Internet.
  (tags: fuck)

• ‘Spaceballs’ to become TV cartoon
  (tags: melbrooks spaceballs)

• SSN group numbers
  (tags: SSN)

• Spiedies
  (tags: spiedies)

• Researchers dispute study pointing to college basketball point shaving
  A University of Illinois economist disputes a widely publicized academic study that claimed to find statistical evidence of point shaving among college basketball teams that are strongly favored by Las Vegas bookmakers.
  (tags: ncaa basketball betting economics)
• DP: Welcome
  Distributed proofreading of digitized works
  (tags: ebooks proofreading distributed)

The CU townies might be interested in this CAS / Millercomm lecture next week. I’ll probably go, if my schedule and the universe doesn’t conspire against me.

Analogy as the Core of Cognition
September 14, 2006
Thursday, 7:30 p.m.
Theatre, Lincoln Hall
702 South Wright Street, Urbana

Douglas Hofstadter
Director, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University

The widely known author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid argues that every concept in our minds arises from an accumulation of analogies stretching back to our earliest childhood, and that thinking — the pinpointing of the right concept at the right time — is the result of a relentless swarm of unconscious analogy-makers competing with each other. He will offer many examples, including errors of diction, expanding spheres of word meanings, proverbs as situation labels, the sudden bubbling-up of buried memories, and counterintuitive leaps that constitute the pinnacle of creative human thought.