I’ve added a new goober over in the far right rail called “recommended reading.” The idea came from my old pal Chuck Taylor, who’s involved in an interesting experiment up in Seattle called “Crosscut“. More on that later (I had an interesting visit with Chuck, and I’m intrigued by what they’re attempting), but the easy bit was a trick Chuck shared.

He used Google Reader, as do I, to process the flood of RSS feeds he reads. Google Reader has a feature called “share” that allows you to tag items to share with others. And then Google builds an RSS feed of those shared items, which can be made public if you choose. So I’m just pulling that RSS feed into a WordPress widget, and “presto,” a flow of the most recent five cool blog items I thought notable enough to share.