I posted about the concept of a Steam Engine Time, so is it time for an intelligent RSS reader. A friend pointed me in the direction of Illumio, which I’d characterise as a kind of combination of intelligent RSS filtering similar to Particls, and a group discussion thread like Tangler, with a touch of an ask the expert interface about it as well.
There is a short video below — I’m yet to install the application, so this isn’t a real blow by blow comparison of various products, but I am interested in the idea that there are emerging applications addressing a similar problem space.
One interesting feature of Illumio is the way that it can apparently scan your hard drive for topics and items of expertise and use this to promote your expertise anonymously. A feature like this would be powerful for Knowledge Management within an enterprise, if only there was an enterprise friendly version!
August 28th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Illumio is doing a very interesting job. I am unsure why feed reading and asking questions is so tightly integrated though.
I’d like to see them export APML from their system so that users/enterprises can leverage the collected ‘Attention Profile’ into many loosely coupled applications.
They are, of course, welcome to join the APML workgroup.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:28 am
Thanks for noticing illumio - yes, we think that there is just so much information out there now that your reader needs to automatically understand what might be interesting to you and update its understanding automatically as you change your focus. People usually don’t want to maintain their profiles manually to get that done.
Chris’ response is interesting; we’ll have to look into APML more closely. So far, our emphasis has been on making sure users feel that their attention data is private to them, and not exploited by others without their approval — even on a case-by-base basis.
By the way, stay tuned for something pretty big from illumio in the next couple of months!