Most recently, Feedly has been working on enhancing the functionality of Feedly Mini (which we cover here) to go beyond being a convenient place to share the page you are currently reading. Previously, the occasional mysterious topic result would appear if you were on a page relating to, say, politics or movies. Now, that feature has been expanded and refined to work on any search query on certain sites, like Google or Amazon. Feedly quickly brings up a weighted result list of discussions and links, along with a link to the originating sites. The search that is performed is done on the client, and no search data is being sent back to Feedly, Google Reader or any other service. The new feature, just like Feedly mini itself, can be turned off in Feedly options as well.

Overall, the new search feature is nicely implemented and we think it will come in very useful. We do have one small wish though, to cover those corner cases where you might be searching for something, say an article on Wikipedia or a product on eBay that you want to share with your friends on Twitter or Friendfeed.. in those cases, we want both the functions of Feedly Mini on the same page - search and share buttons. But for the moment we can't figure out how to turn that on. It either does one or the other, depending on what site you are on.

"There is no question in my mind that convergence is now coming to digital entertainment and consumer electronics. Consumer electronics products are being built using common hardware components from the computer industry, for example, microprocessors, memory, storage, and so on, and most of their capabilities are now being designed as software. The drive toward open standards to link all the components in the home parallels what has been going on in IT for the last 10 to 15 years, and without a doubt, broadband Internet is emerging as the major communications and content distribution platform into the home."

While most R/WW readers already know all this, the article is a nice summation of where we're at circa 2006 with digital media.

"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing. As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.

We don‚Äôt subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso‚Äôs working on) are first generation ‚ÄúFeed Grazers‚Ä? IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engines (like Gada.be) to improve at building multi-level hierarchies on the fly."

Intrigued, I checked out the apps that James referenced. Taskable is described as "a new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." OPod is "an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget that you can embed in any web page you like." Uh, right. I'm none the wiser.

In another post, James calls them "on-demand feeds" - which is more grokable. So you only need these feeds for a short time, then you dispose of them... My Auckland friend Charles Coxhead has been exploring the notion of disposable feeds too.

It's an interesting concept and one which I obviously need to think more on - and read more of James' posts (and Charles too, when he gets around to posting about his experiments). 2006 seems to have become the year when we've realised that RSS, for all the benefits it brings of being able to subscribe to information, doesn't actually solve the core problem of information overload. Perhaps feed grazing, or on-demand feeds, is a step closer to solving the overload problem...