Searching the net’s memory
March 16th, 2003I’ve been trying to find time to explain to my friend Noel Presley (linkless but not for long I hope) how exactly it is that I can keep up with things on the Net without getting overwhelmed. The secret, of course, is news aggregation. I finally showed him my Radio aggregator today and told him how it all works. Since Noel is a heavy Outlook user, I think I’ll point him to an Outlook-based aggregator – if anyone has suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them.
In talking with Noel about aggregation, we also got onto searching. While he was no stranger to Google et al, I showed him Scott’s new Feedster service and the Wayback Machine.
We agreed that Feedster, Google and Wayback represent the short, medium, and long-term memory of the net. It’s really cool how each of these engines orthogonally services its particular slice of net recollection.
It’s not OUtlook, but RSS Bandit is a free outlook-ish RSS aggregator that has its kinks, but overall works well. The author seems to be willing to spend time improving it (I believe he works at Microsoft and did this as an example program for .Net technologies.)
I’m using it now 🙂
Wow. High praise indeed. Thank you.