Setting your RSS newsreader to ping your subscribed feeds every five minutes just isn’t fast enough for you, eh? …
You might want to try a new free product from a company called KnowNow. eLerts-which is beta (of course; what isn’t?)-installs a button to your Internet Explorer toolbar. Once installed, it synchs up with a background service that that monitors your feeds. As soon as a feed is updated, you get an alert on your toolbar.
Adding subscriptions is a matter of dragging one of those ubiquitous orange boxes into the “add channel” field on your toolbar-no need for a newsreader. It’s not an aggregator, though; clicking on an alert takes you to the website that contains the new content. I suspect it’s best for feeds that are critical, not the 1,500 you review every morning; it complements instead of replaces a newsreader.
eLerts is only available for the PC, and I’m on the road with my PowerBook, so I’ll install this on my desktop when I get back to the office so I can take it out for a spin. You’re also out of luck if you use only Firefox, although I suspect that a Firefox version is inevitable if the product takes off. As for a business model, KnowNow plans to offer branded versions for companies.
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
