Battelle (and his commentors) discuss how “…all the majors punted on the presentweb – the fresh stuff that’s being discussed *right now* via blogs, feeds, and pings…”

Let’s be honest here… if you were the EVP of Search at AOL, responsible for a LOB that generated north of $300MM of revenue FY2003, and had finite resources to pursue a seemingly unlimited number of resources, where would feed search sit on your list of priorities. The reality is, probably pretty low at present.

Why? Because, while you do want to innovate (and differentiate your offering), the reality is that feed search is firmly in the “entreprenuerial” stage of its market lifecycle. By definition, competition will increase once the concept is proven and the value apparent, which happens in the growth and maturity stages. Now, of course, different technologies, products, solutions (what have you) progress through the market lifecycle at different paces; it’s entirely possible that the lifecycle of feed search will develop substantially more quickly due to the state of web search, local search et al.

But for now, it is rightfully the domain of the entreprenuer, where it will remain until investment from the “majors” is warranted.

http://www.feedbot.org

We take “pings” from hundreds of thousands of sites, immediately scan the pinging sites, and publish results to our users with a delay that is often less than a minute. To see our new “PubSub Sidebar” that builds a listener directly into your IE browser, go to http://pubsub.com/sidebar. You can also see our support for the “PresentWeb” built into the Gush news aggregator. (http://2entwine.com/features/pubsub.html).

Because “relevance” in the “PresentWeb” is a different concept than relevance in the historical web, we’ve created new, time-sensitive measures of relevance that can be used to filter messages… See: http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks-about.php

The search engine folk seem to think that all problems can be solved by their search engines. “If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” We need both search engines and matching engines. Ideally, the two would be well integrated…

Bob Wyman

The only way you can deal with this problem currently is to ‘go vertical’: construct a framework which reflects the structure of the data in a particular field, scan a lot of current content and slot particular fragments into appropriate parts of the framework.

This is in fact what bloggers currently do manually.

More automated approaches are possible, and will be increasingly needed as rapidly changing content becomes more widespread on the web, but are still I think more likely to cover vertical subject areas than address the ‘presentweb’ as a whole.