Descriptious: Populicious

Thanks to Russell Phillipson for publishing my RSS services article in RAMpage (Computer in Education Group of South Australia).

Aside: I was about to provide a link to the RSS article but my website is down again. It has been dropping in and out for weeks now. I am blaming EduConnect although they are in denial. I guess I will have to set up my site elsewhere. I have just formed a one man organisation called Victims of Educonnect. If you want to join then drop me a line.

I reread my article (written originally in January 2005) in order to do my own review and update. Since writing the article I have begun blogging myself and regularly using the RSS services mentioned (especially blogdex, del.icio.us and bloglines ) and so I now know more.

In the aforesaid article I recommended blogdex as my preferred site for providing a broad overview of what is currently popular amongst the blog collective.

Descriptious: Populicious is a webapp developed by Jonathan Aquino which augments del.icio.us/popular/ with descriptions entered by del.icio.us users.

Translation: del.icio.us users bookmark their favourite websites publicly on the web. From this collection the currently most popular sites can be ascertained by processing the RSS / XML.
These are published at del.icio.us/popular/. Jonathon Aquino has augmented this by adding in the descriptions of those popular sites that have been added by del.icio.us users as they bookmark the websites. The result is displayed at a site with the unwieldy name, Descriptious: Populicious.

Up until now I've set blogdex as my homepage. Blogdex tracks the most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community. I'm now torn between blogdex and Descriptious: Populicious.

Blogdex is more generalist / populist whereas Descriptious: Populicious is more techie.

I also revisited technorati and successfully searched for some of my own blogged articles from there. For example by typing "ICT and the curriculum" in technorati search I quickly found the article I blogged last night.

I was also curious about the current number of blogs in the world. In the original article I had quoted 5 million with a new blog being created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day (stats from technorati in January 2005). The same page in technorati now says "over seven million weblogs". That makes rough sense, about 2 million new blogs have been created this year. I did the maths but won't bore you with it.