My Own Private Echelon
Oct. 30th, 2006 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pphaneufI wrote about communities recently. I was saying how they helped me become better, a bit like some people have said that using Google (or the Internet in general) was like having their IQ increased by 10 points.
So, logically, it follows that I want more of it! But, how, where?
It's pretty clear that I'm not going to actually become smarter by reading stuff on the Internet. What I can get is good intelligence.
Turns out that there's a lot of interesting things that aren't directly written by people, but that are by-products of what they do, such as the music they listen to, the web pages they read, photos they take or look at, source code that they commit, how they link to one another in their journals, etc...
And what's more, a lot of this information is available in RSS or Atom feeds. For example, a number of feeds available about me:
Some of this is interesting to me (like musical recommendations or the further comments on photos I commented on), some of it is interesting to other people (like my bookmarks or my photos).
That's not to mention also feeds for things like bug trackers, per-project commits, wiki recent changes, and what-not, which are very useful to me. As a pusher at NITI, I sure would have liked to have feeds for PDR runs or autobuilder results, say. Maybe just the failed ones, but still.
All these feeds can yield tremendous amounts of information, and since you're picking them, most likely useful information, there need to be some way to sift through it as efficiently as possible. Thankfully, it turns out the intelligence community (like the NSA and the CIA) have been using RSS and Atom to feed their analysts data in a manageable way. And I have a feeling that when it comes to dealing with a metric fuckload of transiently useful bits of information, these people could have a useful clue or two...
So, logically, it follows that I want more of it! But, how, where?
It's pretty clear that I'm not going to actually become smarter by reading stuff on the Internet. What I can get is good intelligence.
Turns out that there's a lot of interesting things that aren't directly written by people, but that are by-products of what they do, such as the music they listen to, the web pages they read, photos they take or look at, source code that they commit, how they link to one another in their journals, etc...
And what's more, a lot of this information is available in RSS or Atom feeds. For example, a number of feeds available about me:
- My bookmarks
- My photos
- Comments on my photos
- Further comments on photos I commented on
- Musical recommendations people made to me
- Recent tracks I've listened to
- Commits I've made to open source projects
- Events on my calendar
Some of this is interesting to me (like musical recommendations or the further comments on photos I commented on), some of it is interesting to other people (like my bookmarks or my photos).
That's not to mention also feeds for things like bug trackers, per-project commits, wiki recent changes, and what-not, which are very useful to me. As a pusher at NITI, I sure would have liked to have feeds for PDR runs or autobuilder results, say. Maybe just the failed ones, but still.
All these feeds can yield tremendous amounts of information, and since you're picking them, most likely useful information, there need to be some way to sift through it as efficiently as possible. Thankfully, it turns out the intelligence community (like the NSA and the CIA) have been using RSS and Atom to feed their analysts data in a manageable way. And I have a feeling that when it comes to dealing with a metric fuckload of transiently useful bits of information, these people could have a useful clue or two...
