Game Design 101

Yes folks, some things don't change.

Really Simple Streamlining

RSS -- that abbreviation that most people still don't know -- is gaining ground among college students by helping them find information more quickly than they could before. The result? More work for every waking hour -- and according to USA Today, that's how most hours are spent.

"Lilangi Ediriwickrema, 21, peruses summaries of the latest articles about stem cell research. She quickly dismisses the first three articles but pauses on the fourth before clicking to read the entire story," wrote Anh Ly of the Gannett News Service. "Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is a way to receive constant updates from news sites, online catalogs and blogs without the laborious process of visiting individual sites, wading through outdated content and managing annoying pop-up ads. ... For Sara Knechtel, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, RSS comes as a relief from the proliferating sea of bogus information on the Web. 'Running searches on Google or Yahoo! will bring back so many irrelevant sources,' Knechtel says. 'There's the issue of making sure the sources you do find are credible.'"

One Way to Avoid P.E.

I never had an aversion to the activities we did in gym class, though I still question my elementary school's emphasis on square dancing, the parachute dance and our compulsory handheld streamer routines performed to the "Flashdance" theme and "Celebrate" by Kool and the Gang .

If only we'd had Internet connections in 1981. That's what I kept thinking as I read this Times piece about online gym:

"Sound like an oxymoron? Not in Minneapolis, where a physical education course joined the school district's growing online catalog in the spring and already has a waiting list," the paper wrote. "'I've never seen a response like this to any course,' said Frank Goodrich, a veteran football coach who is one of two instructors teaching online physical education this summer to about 60 high school students."

The program requires students to "work out hard" for a half-hour four times a week and then check in via e-mail. Parental verification is required.

The Education Department says there were 328,000 student enrollments in public school online courses in the 2002-2003 school year. While gym might sound like an odd course for online study, the Times said today's emphasis on personal fitness makes it a no-sweat decision.

The Times covered high schooler Abbie Modaff: "This summer, Abbie has been training for a triathlon, so she has e-mailed reports on swimming, biking and jogging workouts to her instructor, Tamara Cowan, who is teaching online gym to 31 Minneapolis students this summer from a friend's home in Sacramento. 'When I'm not feeling like I'm about to die, running can be incredibly good,' Ms. Modaff wrote to Ms. Cowan in one workout journal in July."

As for me, I have the Internet thing down just fine. Now it's time to work on the whole physical activity part.

Download on the Farm

U.S. farmers are using computers in larger numbers, but that growth rate is slowing, according to National Statistics Service figures out last Friday. The Associated Press ran a story on this, and provided a look at where the most wired farmers live.

"The nation's most Internet-connected farmers were in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania at 76 percent. Farmers in Western states had high Internet access: Montana at 70 percent, Oregon at 68 percent, Colorado at 65 percent, Idaho at 68 percent and Washington at 65 percent," the AP reported. "The agency also asked farmers for the first time how they accessed the Internet. They found that dial-up was the most common method for 69 percent of those U.S. farms. Roughly 26 percent also said they used the Internet in the past 12 months for nonagricultural business."

Kentucky farmers are the least connected at 30 percent, the wire service said.

A Blog a Second?

"You're kidding, right?" No, folks, I'm quoting.

The BBC cited a report from blog tracking group Technorati, which says these online Web diaries are being created at the rate of one per second.

"In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March," the BBC reported. "It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months."

Bottom line? That's 86,400 new blogs a day that I'll never read.

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.