- Need a way to classify my email so that I can decide what to read after I finish the most essential work items
- Need a way to filter news to a very fine grained level of my interest
- Need to track specific sub segments of the industry, some times up to a single company or even division or a product group in a company
- Keep an eye out for emerging technologies (I became aware of the Semantic Web in 1999 and XML in 1998 by tracking W3C website)
- Find podcasts, videos, blogs and articles on big ideas (TED Talks and HBR)
- Track discussions and ideas on innovation, learning
- Talk trends in software development, programming languages, web scale applications and parallel programming
I tried several things from recurring searches to Google alerts. Even built our own information trackers (InfoMinder) and a Feed aggregation and filtering system (NewsMinder). I think a rule driven Information Aggregation and Filtering system that can be fine tuned constantly may be a really useful system.
In this system each user would build his own set of rules in a language as close to English as possible. I know it is a dream, but we can inch towards it. I need to think through a lot of issues before presenting a paper or building an application. This blog post is the first attempt to put down my thoughts.