in my attempt to discover a feed for a blogger blog, i discovered a viewable directory full of RSS feeds. surely this isn't every RSS feed on blogger. is this how many sites get grouped on the same server? what is it?
one of the dozen or so projects i have in the back of my head is a distributed computational linguistics. i had a pretty solid idea of how i would implement this until earlier today. different grammatical structures (simple sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.) would be defined by components in OPML files. word-level objects would then need a seperate XML format, and could be easily distributed. simple interfaces for maintaining these XML files could be written, allowing anyone to participate in a widely distributed computational linguistics project. individuals might take charge of prepositions, intransitive verbs, etc. my knowledge of linguistics is quite limited, but i think i know enough to get this kind of system working well enough that it could produce interesting results. unfortunately, today i learned that there is no such thing as a noun phrase, so now i need to relearn (or unlearn) a bit about linguistic theories before i can even think about the project. meanwhile, i continue to wonder: why is it that people who study language for a living can't explain language using common language?