Cote on Feed Searches

Cote talks about what web services he'd be willing to pay for. In summation, he decides there would be very few. He does concede that he would probably be willing to toss more money to our new search-engine overlords:

Put another way, it'd tell me about each new site Google found that linked to my weblog. I'd want to be able to do the same thing with any Google query: I don't want to subscribe to the current results the query would return, I just want the diffs since I ran the query last. I want to new just the new results in the query every day/week/whatever.

With Google, I have to manually do this today and sort out the new links from the old links. It's tedious, repetitive, and time consuming: the kind of stuff those amazing computers are really good at. Long ago, before weblogs, when we had to walk to each website we wanted to read (usually up hill, both ways, through snow), I'd do this manual searching about once a month for my websites.

It's amazing to me that Cote's been willing to put that much work into this whole "online experience" thing. I'm sure he's not alone. Back in the golden day, he essentially would function as a "manual, human feedster". Me, on the other hand, found it much easier to just sit back and relax until Feedster and PubSub got created. Now, I get all the rip-roaring ego-strokin' content I need.

Here's the Holy Grail of web content as I see it: To quote Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump, "Even the sun shines on a dog's ass sometimes." To put it another way, even the most moronic, Everquest-addled, Babylon 5 quotin', World-of-Warcraft-lording, Furry-message-board-posting dweeb can express a good idea every once in awhile. I want something to take my meta-interests and scour the web constantly and report back to me after filtering out the junk that these types would talk about that I have absolutely no interest in. Oh yeah, and I want it to be accurate.

As it stands right now, the social networking technology is really good at getting you to people who have a lot in common with you, or at the least, a strong affinity on one characteristic (political views, musical tastes, programming editor of choice). Now I want you to take care of the edge cases for me. Get me the people I have nothing in common with, who I would hate to talk to in real life, and give me the single distilled idea that they have that I would find useful.

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