I’m wondering if this exists, and if not, why not…

Basically, RSS is great, but people seem to publish two classes of data. (And depending on what you want, a given peice of data may fit into either category.)

1) Data I want to ‘pull’.
If I need a break, or I want to catch up, this is perfect — I can see all the ‘new stuff’ out there passively. This is the vast majority of what’s published as RSS — news sites, pundit sites, all the standard ‘blog’ categories. Feed readers work great for this, as do web aggregators.

2) Data I want ‘pushed’ to me.
This is data like that delivered by, say rssauction.com — I want to be updated as soon as a given item matching my criteria hits ebay.

For the second case, the only application I use which actually has the ability to ‘get in my face’ — that I’m always running (for work) — is AIM. And there are lots of good modules in my favorite scripting languages to do both RSS and AIM — so it seems like a fairly straightforward glue situation. Just drop the feeds you want to be updated with into a config file (or do a web ui for it), your well-behaved bot watches all the feeds you’ve asked for, and zings them to you via AIM if you’ve asked for them.

Ah! Bonus feature! It can tell if you are online or away/idle — so it can push things to a fallback location. My cell via SMS if it’s really important, or otherwise, email.

So does this exist? Googling is difficult because the density of tools in this space is very high.

Dec 7, 03:07 PM − Posted in Tech