The Art of Communiculture Fall 1998

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To: Andy Crouch
From: Jason Pearson
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 14:30:44-0400
Re: Newsbots

A tech analyst friend of mine recently told me that by the end of the decade information would be doubling every second. If that happened to the New York Public Library building, in less than a minute it would cover Manhattan. In reality, of course, this information will never be more than raw data somewhere in cyberspace. So how do I find relevant, well edited information in all that mess?

What if you could have someone else sift and select only the information that they knew you would want to read? Not to sound like an utopian TV commercial, but…you can. Newsbots, or personal agents, are individual software programs that search through millions of pages of data looking for predetermined keywords or topics. Newsbots on the Internet range from free shareware to subscription services that run a hundred dollars a year. One free option is Wired's newsbot at http://www.wired.com/newsbot/personal_agent.html.

I have an account at www.inquisit.com with about forty keywords and topics, covering everything from "regeneration quarterly" to "Bill Huxley," one of my clients. Inquisit sifts through 3,500 online publications, news wires, and websites to compile a daily report. Every morning at 6 a.m. I receive 350 individual emails, each with a concise headline in the subject line. In about 15 minutes I can decipher which are the good headlines—usually about 25 articles—which I read. Usually five articles have some relevant information.

Newsbots have some real benefits. There is no way I could afford to find those five articles using conventional clipping services. The articles are delivered in digital form so I can email them to friends and colleagues ...

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