Steve Rubel wrote about Touchstone this week. The application should be some sort of attention management engine, which streams RSS feeds to your desktop using a set of rules as a filter. This should allow you to customize what’s important when. The new FeedDemon 2.0 does the same thing and the beta of NetNewswire also sorts feeds by attention. TiVO does the same for TV… we’re getting there…
[...] Tomorrow the creators of Touchstone will announce a new initiative to implement a “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language” or APML. This new standard should allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers. The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests. You might think this is a bit similar to the AttentionTrust service, but APML does not propose to compete or even cover the same area. It is designed to take attention.xml and all other forms of storing one’s attention and create an outline of ranked interests. [...]
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Good morning Vincent.
Thanks very much for the shout out.
Just a few notes though…
Touchstone is not an RSS news reader, it is actually adapter driven so that you can retrieve data from any conceivable source (assuming you, or someone like you, has written the adapter). It is true, however, that we provide an RSS adapter ‘out-of-the-box’.
Also, while FeedDemon and others are attempting to rank feeds based on how regularly you visit them, Touchstone is much more granular in that it focuses on ranking on an item-by-item basis.
Lastly, it is not a full-screen application, but rather designed to give users a heads-up-display showing updates as they work – The more important an item, the more disruptive the presentation.
Thanks
Chris
Hi Chris,
No rpoblem, thanks for the update! I think I’m gonna give it a try myself to see how it works…
I’ll let you know!
Vincent