Intranet aggregators. I spent most of the week visiting small and large companies. The more I
talk with "real people working in real companies" (meaning: not nerds
spending their whole days hacking), the more convinced I am that a news
aggregator is the ideal center for any Intranet.
The basic idea is merge to the same server contents coming from:
- internal sources (accounting, trouble ticketing, exiting document
management applications, other data bases: we should be able to get a
feed from any internal app)
- k-logs (every member of the group has one)
- external news sources (general news, weblogs, specialized sources, scraped pages)
The output of the aggregator should be
both html that people can browser with their browser and more feeds
which could end up in personal aggregators or funneled in other
applications.
Centralized aggregators should not necessarily mean that every user has
to read all feeds. There should be both the kind of personalization
allowed by personal aggregators (deciding which feeds to subscribe to)
but also added vaue services that would allow users to discover
additional sources of information and anyway give different relevance
to different kind of information snippets that are displayed on the
page.
Paolo has put it succinctly. The aggregator becomes the
organisational hub gathering information from all sources and using
personalisation and intelligence to filter & recombine information
in useful ways before presenting it either as views or as feeds for
other consumers.
No sanity for the DMCA