Why RSS search is so cool
Rick's wondering how to remember that I invited him for fish-n-chips next time he's here in Atlanta.
This is actually something I've been thinking of recently after adding the ability to monitor a web site search via RSS. I thought this was pure genius when I first heard of this idea; the ability to perform a search on a web site, then subscribe to the results so your aggregator tells you automatically when the search returns any new results.
I couldn't resist adding that to the next Dozing Dogs CMS release, as well as another cool RSS feed - you can subscribe to an article's comments now and no longer have to remember to re-visit the article to see any replies.
But back to Rick's problem - how to remember in 6 months that he has an outstanding Dinner invitation in Atlantic City..no, where was it again? He's a busy guy, he won't remember.
But consider taking this RSS search feed one step further. Imagine that a tool was monitoring your incoming and outgoing email, your notes, your appointments and the web pages you visited.
You could then add a search term to this tool, say "Atlanta Flight" and subscribe to the results. One day when you book your flight on Expedia or send an email telling your mom you're flying to Atlanta at the weekend suddenly your RSS feed pops into your aggregator, reminding you "Call James, Fish-n-chips".
Yeah, you'll get some false positives and will have to fine-tune the search term so that it doesn't keep popping up when Atlanta is mentioned on CNN.com, but it's possible to imagine this being very useful I think.
Most of this is possible today. Google Desktop Search already indexes all my email, web pages and notes files. I bet it does proximity searches already to cut down false positives. Add an RSS feed and the ability to name it or add a description of what it's about, and you're done. Perhaps Microsoft's Desktop Search has the RSS ability, I've not checked.
P.S. I think blog tools that don't allow readers to search them suck. It's happening more often that I need to find an old blog entry and I have to try via google because the blog doesn't have search. 