Remembering the Future

Those who read between the lines of these conversations can intuit that RSS is rapidly approaching a critical mass in the enterprise. Notification, subscription, presence, and awareness services are congealing into a real-time events-based information routing fabric that outpaces other existing legacy channels. Such channels include email, developer conferences, print publications, and broadcast media.

Context is NetWeaver's secret sauce—the master data and the analytics around it. It answers questions: With whom have we met at the customer's company? What have they bought already; how quickly do they act? NetWeaver's event processor acts on that context, converting time-sensitive alerts to instant messages and sending them to interested parties—for example, to a product manager for a product mentioned in the event.

"We take a lot of these resolutions and capture them, not for the sake of recording the history but to find repetitive patterns," Agassi said. These ad hoc scenarios are in turn captured as guided procedures and offered as resolution scenarios when the event next occurs.

In a recent thread on the Bloggercon weblog, Dave Winer posed a question: "Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs?". Well over a hundred responses came in. After printing out and reading through the 40+ pages of responses, a few major themes began to emerge. Bloggers wanted to create more easily, connect with others fluidly, create and manage communities around their weblog and throughout the blogosphere, and conserve their content. Here is what they said.