Edwardo suggested to me a new kind of forum-esque system that would incorporate RSS feeds, 'events', discussions, and IM focused on individual topics. Of course, all this stuff has been done before - meaningful integration is what presents the challenge.
Suppose you had a client that's like an IM client, except that it notifies you for any number of events: Postings, chats, blog posts, news items... The list could be as long as you care to make it. Maybe you could even send pictures or files as torrents. In addition to consuming RSS, maybe all your interactions with the system could be published as an RSS feed. (Neat, but of dubious usefulness at this point.)
I think I'll call it Starfish. It's always good to have a name to think of these things by. Just thinkin'...
Posted by eric at December 28, 2004 04:32 PM
Comments
I kept getting annoyed by RSS feeds (or at least the ATOM feeds provided by Blogger - I'm kinda late to the game to this whole RSS schmikity schmakity) that don't contain any information about comments - just posts.
So I wrote my own comment aggregator for the blogs that I read - because I'm a geekatron - using Perl to parse through the raw HTML and find the comments section (yes, I did things the stupid way and used regular expressions), and then spin a happy little HTML page every hour.
So yeah if there was a nice pretty application (I'm feeling a buzzword like "convergence" or "synergy" coming on) that I could use to say "Monitor this blog, monitor all blogs for this topic, and let me know when there's a 'breaking' news story." That would be pretty rad yo.
Posted by: MooCow at December 28, 2004 07:29 PM