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Dave Taylor
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains three weblogs, The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, focused on business and industry analysis, the eponymous Ask Dave Taylor devoted to tech and business Q&A and The Attachment Parenting Blog, discussing topics of interest to parents. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

Sorry NewsGator, I'm switching to FiltrBox

I have been a fan of NewsGator for many years, and count company founder Greg Reinecker among my friends. In the last few years, however, they've moved in the direction of corporate information portals and cobrand their splendid RSS reader for large corporations, media outlets, etc. They're doing great, but as an entrepreneur and (I admit it) information junkie, I migrated from NewsGator Online to Google Reader about a year ago and haven't looked back.

Except for one problem: NewsGator has very sophisticated search capabilities that are neatly integrated into their RSS reader, and after years of successive refinement, my current search query is the unwieldy:

NewsGator: Keyword search for intuitive.com or askdavetaylor.com or blogsmart or findability.info or "dave taylor" -hockey -kings -wwe -wrestling -alberta -government -"Best MLM Company"
It's long, ugly, complicated, but it works very well to help me keep track of mentions of my business anywhere in the blogosphere.

I could use Google Alerts for the task, and I do have some Google Alerts running, but it doesn't search as big a pool of information as NewsGator does.

Nonetheless, using NewsGator Online in addition to Google Reader is tedious at best, so when I had a chance to sit down this afternoon with my friend Ari Newman, head of Filtrbox, and get a quick demo from him, I was struck at how incredibly easy they're going to make it for all of us to have -- and continually tweak and improve -- highly sophisticated searches.

The most important part: Not only is Filtrbox stepping through more information sources, but I can easily create an RSS feed and -- and here's the kicker -- subscribe to that feed in Google Reader.

Now, finally, a way to have everything integrated into a single place.

As I said when I started, sorry Greg, I'm leaving NewsGator Online after many years, and can finally centralize everything in Google Reader, thanks to the powerful filtering capabilities of Filtrbox.

Note: Filtrbox is not yet open to the public, but Ari assures me it'll be ready for everyone in just a few weeks...

Posted by Dave Taylor at April 25, 2008 8:15 PM

Comments

Did you know about Google Blog Search?

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=%28intuitive.com+%7C+askdavetaylor.com+%7C+blogsmart+%7C+findability.info+%7C+%22dave+taylor%22%29+-hockey+-kings+-wwe+-wrestling+-alberta+-government+-%22Best+MLM+Company%22&btnG=Search+Blogs

That's what I've been using, with a search query similar to yours. It also produces a RSS feed that I subscribe to.

Of course I'm curious how Filtrbox' results will compare, so I just signed up for the beta list.

Posted by: Patrick on May 13, 2008 10:05 PM
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