Mac OS X people who can do Radio scripting -- want an interesting project that people would really appreciate (not for me, I still use Windows) -- wire BBEdit into Manila through XML-RPC. Talk with Paolo. I bet he would like to sell such a widget. [Scripting News]

Oh yesssss!

Ziv Caspi:With this I take issue. I think that the real power of aggregation chains (an information feed aggregator possibly preceeded by an RssDistiller-like stage that takes care of subscriptions, periodic pinging sources, scraping, etc) is that it bring all the relevant information to your client, not that it brings links. [more...]

Wait: I agree that aggregators should bring contents on the user's desktop database, I hate links to relevant news too and I would like to never have to leave my fast and efficient personal application server.

What I wanted to say is that the original version of that content is (and hopefully will remain) available on some server somewhere on the net. Items in aggregators are temporary, they are deleted as soon as they are pushed "out of the window" from newer contents. The personal aggregator offers a personalized view of contents that are actually stored on other servers. I think that personalized is the keyword, the one we need to concentrate upon.

Here's how the process should work in this new information economy:

1. Content is created on somebody desktop or from some other kind of intellgent bot
2. Content is stored on a server
3. I get the content in my aggregator for immediate reading
4. If I need to recover that same content at some later time, I use google.

Important notice: This applies also to intranet environments, actually I think that at the moment is almost more important for restricted group of users, such as companies, than to the whole big internet. Users in a company will always (hopefully) be much more focused, thus making this kind of set-up much more valuable.

[Paul Holbrook, about news aggregators] At first blush, this sounds great. But how do you prioritize those kinds of items? At what point does your news aggregator start to resemble the fire hose that email has turned into?

Paul is right, in fact I did not mean that the current Radio aggregator is going to be the final solution, but it is showing us the way. Using Mark Paschal's Kit set of tools, for example, you can already categorize items in a news aggregator, and suddenly everything starts making more sense, just like we use filters to manage email.

The point is that with tools like Radio, users can move a significant part of the content management workflow to their desktop, they can choose how to visualize it and define the flows of information. Most of all, they can decide how to visualize those contents.

While some might choose to keep all work feeds in one category and news feeds in another, others might prefer to see the New York Times news next to their budget updates.

Besides, unlike email, where the message is only stored in your local mailbox, aggregators are just a way to be notified about updates, the actual data still sits on the New York Times site, your accounting software, intranet server, other weblogs, etc.