Let me see if I understand where you are going.

What you are proposing is a way to "subscribe" to services that you would, by means of the subscription, allow to access your data. They in turn would then be able to better compile information (news, whatever) that would be specifically tailored for you.

If that is correct, let me pose a few questions.

If you control/store the data locally, how do you propose to share this data? Since we are transient, firewall protected and what not, it couldn't be the local machine, it would have to be server based.

Would you propose a distributed protocol for a vendor to tap into your data similar to say bittorrent?

Also if you house the data, which would only consists or location information (url) then processing would need to occur. For this to work you would suspect a vendor to process that through a batch of some sort.

How do you see this data being crunched? Certainly not in real time?

I like the idea here and am interested to see where it ends up.

Alex.

Tools like this let you measure for long periods of time without having to keep up with it. It's handled for you.

When you've gotten a bunch of measurements, you can use those as evaluation tools, as training data for learning algorithms, etc. You then ask the filter for things like "What topics am I really spending my time looking at?", "What is my daily 'biorhythm'?", Am I doing most of my surfing when I should be working?", "Can you give me 10 articles that are fresh and interesting?".

Then, you feed raw data (think subscribe to 50,000 feeds) through the derived filter and ask those questions of it, it can do its job.

However, without a huge pile of data as input, you can't build step 2. The real likelyhood is that the truly useful things you can do with this kind of data aren't going to be apparent until you start working with the resulting dataset. *Then*, the really interesting stuff starts.

This is just the mechanics that need to be in place to make the good stuff happen.