aggregation

About a month ago, we quietly added a personalized page feature to BlufftonToday.com.

Personalization has been around for quite awhile -- it dates back to March 1995, when Jeff Boulter announced CRAYON (named for "CReAte Your Own Newspaper"). Newspapers haven't done much with it, but just about every portal and search engine has a my.sitename.com feature.

We've wondering whether a "my page" tool could contribute anything significant to frequency-of-use numbers, and there's no way to know without trying it, so we did.

I lost a lot of work in progress when my Compaq Evo laptop bit the dust, but the thing that has surprised me is how hard it's been to lose my RSS feeds. A key part of my job is keeping up with what's happening on the Internet, and suddenly I'm ... disconnected. Bam! Losing a couple of years' worth of email is hard; losing a huge list of RSS feeds turns out to be much harder.

I have an OPML file backed up ... from about a year ago. The best stuff came from the most recently added feeds. It's like losing part of your mind.