The Perfect Servant

In my ranting about blogs last week, I realized that one of the reasons they overwhelm you is that we're just not there yet with filtering. The ideal syndication tool would be one that automatically harvests everything you're interested in, and nothing you're not, and shows you only the interesting stuff. You don't have to worry about which posts or blogs to read, or which Web sites to check out. You just get what you want to see automatically.

Of course, this means that a complete, and ever changing profile of you has to exist somewhere. I'm sure Google would be only too happy to collect that information.

In a sense, this is the idea behind groups such as those run by Yahoo! and Google. You subscribe to join the groups you're interested in, and get to see all the content, without having to scan through a lot of other stuff. Of course, the problem with that is that the only real filter is what people posting to the group think is appropriate. We all know where that gets us.

Think about the movies in which some fantastically rich person has servants who supply only the relevant mail, or only the interesting parts of the newspaper. That's what computers should be ... perfect servants. They should know exactly what we do and don't need or want to see, and present all of that, and nothing else. They should be omnipresent, and available all the time.

Wake me when we get there.