How much do I owe Brent Ashley? Let me count the ways! Actually, you folks owe Brent because he created a handy dandy PHP script that provides a secondary, truncated RSS feed for my site. Go ahead and scroll on the left until you see a purple XML button labeled "abridged." I'll wait here while you go look, but make sure you come back....

That button is courtesy of Brent's script, which is now running on my server. So if you don't like to see all of my long posts in all of their glorious beauty, you can subscribe to the newborn abridged version and fend for yourself. One note about the secondary feed - it's really more for cleansing feeds, so the HTML characters get stripped out. This means no links within the aggregator posts, and no links at all if I don't include a linked title. I'll try my darndest to start including titles on everything, but it may take a while to get used to it. Thanks for your patience, and remember to be careful what you wish for in the future!

Good thing Brent came along when he did, too, because readers that didn't want me to truncate my original feed edged out the abridged advocates by a mere 3%. So if you're one of those folks that will be taking advantage of this new version, please be sure to lean out the window and holler a big thanks in Brent's direction!

Phil Wolff left me a comment noting the following:

"How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a million or even a billion people?" Adrian Scott's contribution to the Edge World Question Center for 2002.

Darned good question.

I subscribe to more than 400 RSS news sources and weblogs now. That is an eight hour day just to keep up. Prioritization, filtering, trusted recommendation, summarization, threading, clustering and related techniques are becoming mandatory to manage the flow in a reasonable time.

Adrian's answer includes the idea of a personal Customer Relationship Management system. Maybe Radio will become part of this? I'd like to see Ryze, my Palm Desktop, and Outlook better integrated with Radio."

I don't have anything to add to this except to say 1) 400 news sources beats my measly 136 (does size matter when it comes to number of feeds subscribed to?), and 2) ditto to everything else. And add extra dittos in bold and italics for the Palm and Outlook wishes, too.

I know Adam Curry does weird and wonderful things with his calendar, but it's a bit over my head to say exactly what those things are. I wonder if they could be part of the equation, too (as might vCalendar). Naturally, I can't find the link to his description of it at the moment, but I know part of it includes making each day's events an RSS file.