Filtering the feed
Techmeme has added a missing piece of functionality to its search feature--RSS. Now users can subscribe to results for any query and have them show up in widgets and RSS readers.
Not exactly a super newsworthy event, but increasingly news aggregation and filtering services, including Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, Blogrunner and a host of others, are filling in the gap between the overflow of content from the thousands of sources and RSS readers. Some RSS readers, such as NewsGator, are adding collaborative filtering to surface recommended stories. FriendFeed is adding a summarization feature to filter content. Twitter has a tracking feature for making better sense of conversations.
The ultimate filtering is to have intelligent software agents combing through billions of documents in real time, traversing 3D simulated worlds and finding the relationships, clusters, anomalies and other artifacts and presenting just the right content at the right time to users in an optimal form for consumption. That dream is still a long way off...
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
