I think there is a growth trend here. Wikipedia just added its 300,000th entry. Technorati is now tracking its 3 millionth blog. No wondering about the viabilty of this stuff anymore, I would think…
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If you missed NECC, you can now access some of the workshops and presentations via Webcast. Included is Anne’s Weblogs workshop, all of the keynotes, and about half-dozen others that pretty much run the gamut. You need to go through a quick registration process to see the videos.
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Ok, so happy birthday to Bloglines, and guess what? We get a present! Cool! The new and improved Bloglines looks sleeker, number one, and adds a whole bunch more fun stuff to play with, number two. Included in that second part is a clip blog where you can post and comment on what you find, just like in a regular Weblog. (Here’s mine.) And of course, once you find a clip blog that you want to follow, you can easily subscribe to it in Bloglines. It’s also easier to just save clippings into various folders that you set up for your own content management.

Some other new stuff from the press release:

Bloglines Directory, a listing of all news feeds indexed by Bloglines with added features not seen in typical directories. Bloglines Directory also supports the community qualities of blogging and feed reading, and allows users to view the news feeds others are reading to discover new sources and learn from people with similar interests.

Bloglines Top Links, a tracking and ratings feature that calls out the most popular feed and blog articles each day, and highlights topic trends that are gaining (or losing) popularity in the blogosphere.

Bloglines Recommendations, a feature that offers Amazon.com-like tailored suggestions of other feeds and blogs you might like based on your current subscription interests.

At first blush, this looks like a great step for Bloglines. I’ve been thinking about the content management piece of this new literacy stuff fairly often, looking to Furl as the best tool feature-wise. The problem with Furl from a teaching standpoint is that you have to be able to carry the “Furl it!” link on your toolbar, something that isn’t going to happen with our classroom machines at least. (I wonder if there is a way to use it as a bookmark…) Bloglines is web-based and therefore would be easier to access. But I’m not quite sure yet how it would differ from setting up students with their own sites to perform pretty much the same function.

I have to play more, obviously, but hearty congratulations to Mark Fletcher and his crew for giving us more to experiment with. There is a great deal of effort being put into information management that will have implications for teachers and students…the fun part is figuring it all out.