I took most of my time online yesterday and today to absorb various websites, blogs and emails that I hadn't looked at for the 10 or so days I was offline. It is interesting for me to consider now what to do with all of that information. So, I did an experiment with it.

Since creating this blog, I have used blogging as a way to highlight things that interest me, day by day. In particular, I think of this as a way to structure, for myself, threads and subjects that I want to keep up with.

Having not linked and commented on these various information bits for 12 days, I wondered if I could do a blog entry highlighting web content created between July 17th and today that is interesting to me—that I wanted to read in detail and keep track of.

As it turns out, after doing only a single topic (FOAF) as covered by a single blogger (Marc Canter), I am totally burned out.

Here is the list I created. As simple as this looks, this list took a lot of work to create:

Marc Canter's links and comments on FOAF, July 17 - 29, 2003

• 7/29: More FOAFy nerds
• 7/28: foaf:groups ver .01
• 7/25: Ben's into hash and he's not even in Amsterdam
• 7/24: Explosion of Interest in FOAF
• 7/23: FOAF Web of Trust
• 7/21: FOAF Reputation System
• 7/21: Getting FOAFy wit it, Friends of FOAF, Easy FOAF Notes, Here We Go (on Technorati and FOAF)
• 7/18: New FOAF summary site

As it turns out, I think there will be an easy and largely automated way to create this kind of list with iCites. Part of what I think will be fun and useful with iCites is not only can you repackage your own information in fun and useful ways for yourself and others, other people can repackage your information in fun and useful ways for themselves and others.

So, if I could right now, I would repackage what is interesting to me from all of my favorite sites, that is newly created between July 17th and July 29th, into topical / thematic lists. As I explored those interesting bits, I would repackage what really stands out to me into other lists, for example, that have immediate relevance to me like my "list of alternative ways to store data, maybe without using an RDBMS or XML" list.

I am just getting back into building the iCite net prototypes, and I will post more on this shortly. For now, I will have to pass on creating some of the lists I want, because doing so by hand is too inconvenient!