(Backlinks button will lead to references of other people thinking about similar things...)

An expansion of the BlogWeb RSS-aggregator idea. Why just have a tool that manages "incoming" messages that originate from blogs? Why not have a single monitoring/filtering app that processes everything you're interested in, from EMail to private NNTP newsgroups to blogs, etc?

• this could even be a Unified Messaging hub: it could be the central Rule Based system for forwarding stuff to your pager/PDA, regardless of the original format!

([OK], let's start refactoring this page...)

Rough goal: provide a single [Personal Portal]/Dash Board for monitoring (soothingly) all the documents/messages that interest you, going in all directions (e.g. documents you write, tasks assigned to you, tasks you assigned to others, threads of conversations among other people where you have only a soft interest, etc.). See David Brin's Earth excerpt demonstrating this idea.

Features:

• read lots of message/item/node types

  • EMail

  • WebLog (RSS, plus scrapings/virtual-RSS for non-RSS blogs)

    • likewise for changes to other sites?

    • WiKi Recent Changes

  • NNTP groups, threads (UseNet, 3rd-party, and private servers)

  • web-based Group Discussion servers

    • WebLog comments

  • Instant Messaging? (maybe some of it doesn't get your attention instantly anymore)

  • if this is supposed to be an Attention Management Dash Board, then you probably need PIM/Group Ware views here too: calendar, tasks, etc.

• filter/prioritize (maybe a series of agent filters which add/subtract points)

  • e.g. spam gets low rating (Bayesian Filter of content, prescence of red-tagged text, any Java Script, more than 1 inline image...)

  • boss and spouse get big push

  • every item from a channel you subscribe to starts with a certain number of points (actually, you'll probably have different tiers, each with a different default point value - see Ecosystem Of Networks)

  • items linking to (esp. non-home) pages/items you've linked to (recently vs ever?): Blog Thread

  • maybe never delete anything (at least not automatically), but you may never look at 90% of what flows into the repository

  • reverse-glossary: turn word/phrase into Wiki Word (and add points)

  • [Virtual Folder]? (is WiKi Back Links sufficient?)

  • do Meta Data/RDF magic like ZoE

• present overview ([Personal Portal])

• allow reading of detail

  • earlier filtering provides lots of Intertwingular Ity (this might be where a Personal Web Archive comes into play as well...)

• author/deliver items

...........................

(original page bits below)

You'd have to scrape and process lots of stuff. Then maybe you could just save the Meta Data as RDF.

Might it make sense to use RSS as the format of exchange?

• GrOove folks, among others, are playing with providing an RSS view of incoming EMail.

This could be a GUI nightmare. Whether done as a Rich Client or local WebApp.

Paolo Valdemarin notes a Yahoo Groups feature to provide RSS. [Joseph Kocherhans] is thinking the same way about EMail.

Paolo Valdemarin thinks of this as a desktop-based portal app.

The [Fetch Retriever] seems to think this way.

(Oct'02 thought) What might make this a big win is making it more possible for people to use things other than EMail. I think most people default to using email for communication because all those discussions end up in a single Inbox (vs having that Inbox, plus having to remember to check various threads in the Group Discussion server, etc.). But if you could have an Inbox which was basically just a personal portal into lots of different tools (esp if each is very simple/focused), maybe things change. Note these push back against my related AppLog idea...

This smells similar to Life Streams. Buts here the focus/mission is to prioritize what you look at.

Boot Strapping thoughts

What Open Source app could be extended most easily in this direction?

• EMail clients

  • MozIlla

  • ???

• Web Browser

  • MozIlla

  • ???

It would be nice if MozIlla were up to this much customization. I have high hopes for OSAF...

Does this need to be:

• an app that natively handles all operations and media types (e.g. EMail reader/writer, NNTP)?

• Or a proxy/previewer that launches [Best Of Breed] apps like EMail? (kinda like ZoE?)

Pro-launcher

• simpler to write

• allows user to mix/match with preferred/[Best Of Breed] clients

Pro-wide-function

• native clients provide inbox listing but no other Intertwingular Ity benefits.

• clients don't yet support URI for opening a message, etc.

How important is it to have the benefit of this functionality from multiple machines? Does it need to run in the Cloud? But then what about OffLine use?

EmacsGnus has many features along these lines. Beyond NNTP and a variety of EMail formats and sources, [Emacs Gnus] (EMacs) also supports accessing groups (forums) from Web searches, Slashdot, Ultimate [BBS], web-based email archives like Yahoo Groups and mail-archive.com, RSS, local directories, and "document" groups. --Ken Mac Leod 19June2002

You might also be interested in my thoughts along these lines, which I wrote up in Introducing the Microcontent Client --Anil Dash

• yup, already familiar with it, see z2002-10-31- Microcontent --Bill Seitz (also, I took the idea to Micro Content absurdly far in NodeWeb)

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