Not even energy for the incredibly interesting

I don't know about you, but generally there are too many interesting and important things going on to keep up. Here are a few I've been wanting to dive into and write more about:

Amazon's Readability Rating
One of Amazon's New! features. Basically, they run a book's entire text through a program that ranks the complexity of words and sentences and spits out a variety of different numbers to rank the book's "readability". For example, I can find out that 75% of books are harder to read than Eunice Lipton's Alias Olympia. That number is flipped for Umberto Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, for which only 30% of books are more challenging. These are derived from standard readability scales like the Flesch-Kincaid Index. No comment for now on the fact that Amazon only applies these metrics to books in their Search Inside program, or that when they are applied the results are buried deep in the chaos that their book pages have become.

MIT's OpenCourseWare
Complete collections of syllabuses, calendars, reading lists, lecture notes, assignments, and related resources from numerous MIT courses, available for free, to anyone. Part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Among other offerings from MIT, you'll find 20th Century Art, and Modern Art and Mass Culture from MIT professor and author Caroline Jones.

Indexing
Yes, all those pages of fine print and page numbers at the back of books. Not very glamorous on the surface, but one way or another indexing (and I think human-powered indexing specifically) is about to emerge in a serious way. My renewed interest stems from this post at the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog, and a serendipitously timed post by Lorcan Dempsey of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).