(Via Alex Halavais) It seems doubtful that this will stay up for too long, but you have to check out this very cool app which automatically links text in BBC News articles to Wikipedia. It looks just like the BBC page, but, for instance, any where the name Tony Blair shows up, it automatically creates a link to the Wikipedia entry. How cool is that? Imagine if students read news articles like this…don’t know about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? No problem…just click the link.

I really, truly love this stuff.
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So there’s been a lot of people talking about the “new” My Yahoo and it’s RSS capabilities. Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very cool that they are moving to include and support RSS on a pretty wide scale. And while I find it a bit overwhelming, the whole concept of an aggregated page of content like this is very intriguing. But I agree with Jenny that the limitations of the interface don’t make it very good solution as a news aggregator when you track dozens of sites.

But here’s a cool little hack. Mikel Maron has created a way for you to take limited feeds out of My Yahoo and use them wherever else you want to, which for me means in my Bloglines account. Right now it only works for your stock quotes, weather, movie listings and your yahoo e-mail. But more might be on the way. (I hope he can find a way to let us take feeds from Yahoo News searches.) Anyway, I’ve added my local movie listings to my Bloglines account (feed number 138…oy.) Just another step on the RSS road…
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Not sure if I’d call it a groundswell, but I’ve been setting up sites at a pretty heady clip the last few days, and yesterday (as the previous post so cryptically suggests) I started a workshop with 20 teachers who want to be bloggers (or should I say use blogs?) Cool thing is they’re from all over the map: English, math, consumer sciences, special ed, art, world languages. And I think they left yesterday’s class with brains fairly well wrapped around the concept and thinking about the possibilities. (This teacher obviously got religion.)We meet again tomorrow, and they have the “assignment” to create a couple more posts between now and then. We’ll do some more configuration and posting tomorrow then move on to RSS on Thursday. We’ll see…

So we’re nearing 400 sites on our server, probably 75% of them what I would call “active.” That might be a record. Very cool.