I was doing the last check mail/check aggregator of the day and I decided to peek at the server's log files when, at 22:45:26, I saw a hit coming from an IP address that did not look familiar.

I pinged instantly Matt with: "Hey, they are watching the site right now". Seconds later in another window Mikel, who was at the conference, wrote "ben hammersly is demo-ing k-collector right now".

I called Matt on the phone and we kept receiving real time reports from Mikel, while we were trying to figure out what was going on in that room on the other side of the world. At some point we got "marc is going off, rallying the crowd", I have spent the whole summer of '98 making demos with Marc in Trieste, I could perfectly picture the scene. It went on until 23:11 when Mikel wrote "we're done", but not before saying hi to David Weinberger who was sitting right next to Mikel.

As stupid as it might seem... it has been exciting.

Dave Winer: RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

I totally agree, this is why after trying other aggregators I came back to Radio: it's just like reading a very large weblog updated by several people every hour, it's an activity we are familiar with and the ability that we have to scan titles and relevant information in a page makes this approach much more efficient than having to move from source to source.

If an aggregator is meant as a way to take a snapshot of what's going on on hundreds of sources and quicky present it to us, I believe that presenting news in reverse chronological order is the way to go.

But I also think that aggregators could be an interesting way to archive content, to let somebody quickly retireve something wrote sometime in the past.

Archiving by author, again, does not make sense: most weblogging applications already do that, if I'm looking for something and I know who wrote it, I can simply look on the author's site.

There are search engines, which are of course a good way to find information, but not always very efficient. There are cases when a directory might be more useful.

We believe that archiving by topic in a directory could be a solution, and this is what we are trying to do. It's not for daily instant reading, it's to archive content.