The vision of the new, simple, beautiful world of information, where everyone can gather information from anywhere, select it, customise it, and reformat it (perhaps even read it sometimes) is a seductive one. At one end you have RSS or Atom feeds generating streams of news items, blog entries, or whatever; at the other end you have personalised home pages that display those streams, or stand-alone newsfeed-reading tools, or plug-in feed readers such as Sage for Firefox. The tools get cleverer and cleverer, both for formatting and for searching: a recent blog post by David Tebbutt shows a nice tool that takes a search term, passes it to Google’s blog search page, and creates a live window that shows a list of matching blog entries. “Try it,” he says.
So I did.
It doesn’t work.
