RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an incredibly useful way of surfacing and organizing data and is something I am considering for the big-secret-project. Yesterday I spoke with Jeff Nolan who is VP corporate development at Newsgator and also a fellow Irregular. The company has made all its client side applications free in what many of my colleagues have described as a ‘gutsy’ move.
At the same time, he mapped out for me the way the company is going and how it sees itself aggregating attention data – that’s the data to which you pay attention from around the interwebs – and relevance data – that’s the stuff you’re most interested in such that it becomes possible to get a deeper understanding of a particular topic. This is fascinating. If Newgator manages to do the business, then it will mean that I have much more powerful discovery tools at my disposal. Mike Gunderloy at WebWorkerDaily has an excellent slant on the issues around privacy as it relates to this topic.
From an enterprise perspective, it means that I can implement a layer of technology over a collection of webs that will act as the ‘glue’ for information that would otherwise have slipped through the net. This is important in the context of bringing say tax case material out of a library together with contextual discussions in blogs.
It’s all good stuff.
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