A New Year, a New Feed Structure

I decided to forego New Year’s resolutions this year, choosing instead to do some serious housecleaning. For way too long my RSS feeds and my bookmarks have grown unattended and become virtually unmanageable. Today I culled and reorganized my feeds.

In the process I realized how the additions and deletions over the past year reflect changing interests and emphasis on my part. Not too long ago, my feeds nearly all related to education and learning. They were organized into three categories: Individuals; Organizations; and Publications.

The revised structure uses 4 categories: Data Science; Learning Systems; First Principles; and Miscellaneous.

Education and learning is still featured prominently, but the largest number of feeds now falls under Data Science. This reflects my project work with XQuery et al. But it also reflects a change in the edu-blogging world that I’m not certain how to interpret. I’ve only been blogging for 2+ years, so my historical perspective is short. But it seems like there are quite a few people who wrote active and interesting blogs 2 years ago who now write less frequently and with changed focus (eg, more personal and less controversial). Maybe it’s Twitter; maybe blogging has lost some luster; maybe it’s the weight of work and life; maybe it’s something else entirely. But these were voices I enjoyed, so the relative silence feels like a loss.

The category I’m most excited about growing is First Principles. I struggled a bit naming this category. It’s meant to include disparate dreams and imaginations of the world as it could be and should be, rather than how it is.

Now for the bookmarks. Here, I think the Daodejing got it right … “There is no greater calamity than not knowing what is enough.”