There was a lot of talk about software agents about ten years ago — computer code that would seek, filter, and deliver information specific to your interests I have not tried this yet, but I'm interested that people are trying with today's technology — and that RSS is one of its building blocks.
Introducing Primal Assistants: A framework for software agents
Derek Wyatt
Primal does a lot of heavy lifting in knowledge representation and content filtering. If you ask it to grab you some relevant content around your interests, it will do precisely that.
But what if you don’t want to have to ask? Search engines are fantastic, but they still require that you go to them and then try to figure out how to formulate your query in a way that gets you decent results.
Primal already has the ability to understand what you want, and we’re now working on some technology that will let Primal deliver you the content that you truly care about before you know you want it.
Read on to learn more about Primal’s new software agent and content streaming framework.
What we’ve got cooking
If you want Primal to bring you the content you care about, or send that content to someone else on your behalf, or mix it all up in a blender so you can drink it in your morning protein shake… no problem.Let’s say you have interests in Fitness and Travel. You’ve told Primal about these interests and Primal has dutifully created an interest graph to represent them. Now, you want to filter massive amounts of content through these interests as it becomes available, and route that to various places on your behalf.
Phi Beta Iota: Most of what is being created today by spontaneous but highly fragmented parties was known to be needed twenty years ago, but the US intelligence community refused to be serious about the needs of analysts and instead stayed with its technical collection as corporate welfare model (that provides second careers for seniors, analyts remain peons for life). Howard Rheingold was one of the 1980's pioneers in tools for thinking, and remains one of the most valuable curators on this topic.
See Also:
Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents