This is the problem that Setster was designed to solve. On the back end, once registered, the Setster user can set up their business information, work hours, service providers, basic services with cost if any, choice of widget style and maybe some important clients. Users can also manually enter appointments on the calendar once everything else is set up, as well as approve, make changes to, or reject unverified or unconfirmed appointments. On the front end, users are given a Setster URL that they can give to their customer to schedule appointments, or they can take the widget code and embed it in their own business web page.

From the client end, there is access to a very simple-to-use widget either from the business web site (after set-up) or the Setster provider-specific site, where a client can choose an appointment time and fill out the rest of the details, and then click on an email confirmation link. The service takes care of reminding the provider (the Setster user) of the appointment and confirming it on their end. Alerts can also be set for important appointments.

Finally, the site has been tuned to also work with small business that may have several employees all with busy calendars. One login allows selecting which employee calendar to look at, and choosing the next available appointment slot either for one employee specifically, or across all the calendars (first available). This can be a great help in a business like a hair salon where the customer may not need to choose the same person each time.

There are a couple of downsides to be considered. First, there doesn't seem to be a way to import or export calendar data from Setster. It seems to assume that a company will start off using this software and love it so much they will never want to migrate to anything else. Second, the site indicates that the service isn't going to be free, or that perhaps there will be tiered pricing. However, we couldn't find any suggestion for how much it would cost to use Setster after it emerges from beta, so you might want to get signed up and test it now if the concept appeals to you.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, read this from Rafat Ali over at PaidContent.org and tell me it's not a very similar situation to the one Bloglines found itself in:

NB: emphasis mine.

Noah Brier also has some thoughts on this. He says that "if Bloglines gives me a very good product (which I believe it does), I can deal with some advertising so that it remains free as long as it's in good taste and not overwhelming." As he later points out though, that's the consumer angle. The contentious point is on the content producer side of the equation. Jason Calacanis said that "protecting publishers and authors is NOT anti-blogosphere" and I largely agree with him, with the following caveats:

For small-scale content producers, provided that Bloglines gave bloggers a slice of the pie (a la Google Ad Sense), then I think most smaller content producers would be happy. But when it comes to those content producers who have the ability to generate their own advertising sales (like Gawker and Weblogs Inc), that's where Bloglines' proposed advertising strategy becomes a conflict. And don't forget there will be a minority of smaller content producers who also complain (e.g. Schwimmer) and they will make a lot of noise and generate bad publicity for Bloglines. They may even make legal challenges - especially if they are lawyers (like Schwimmer). Which all spells bad news for Bloglines' advertising business model, even if they managed to keep the majority of (small) content producers assuaged.

So I think the above, in a nutshell, is why the contextual advertising strategy would not have worked for Bloglines and why they backed out of it very quickly.

Lots of twists and turns in this plot, so it would indeed make a great movie :-) A suggested title: "Content Wars: Episode Web 2.0". Oliver, you're welcome to make an offer in the comments...

Fred tells a nice little anecdote of venture capitalism in the 90's (I'm currently reading Po Bronson's Nudist on the late shift, about Silicon Valley in that era, so I'm in that frame of mind already...). Fred writes:

So now we're in 2005 and we have blogging 2.0, which Fred sees as different to 1.0 in 4 ways: posts, permalinks, RSS, and "CPC and contextual ad networks". He also talks about "a media model around the Blogging 2.0 platform".

Jeff Jarvis wrote about a similar thing in another post. He said that "if you were starting About.com today, you wouldn't create a centralized marketplace of cheap content." He prefers the decentralization model. The comments to that were very interesting, with some support for the About.com model. Anil Dash compared About.com to weblogsinc and gawker (this was perhaps the inspiration for Fred's post?). Jason Calacanis agreed with Anil in Jeff's comments, saying that "Gawker and WIN are next generation About.com's to a certain extent."

Interestingly, an About.com employee also left a comment on Jeff's blog. I have to say, it sounds a wee bit sniffy about blogs:

RM says: Believe it or not, some of us bloggers are serious about our writing too. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Online Diary Land any more.

The first thing I need to point out is that topic and tag feeds are essentially just searches for future content. This is how PubSub advertises it in fact - "Search the Future!" is one of their taglines. 

Normally when you use Google or MSN, you're searching for past content. So the key difference to traditional web searching is that by subscribing to searches, you automate the process and future results will come flowing to you via RSS. If you have a topic of interest that you want to keep up-to-date with, then it's much simpler to subscribe to searches on that topic and wait for results to come to you - instead of you going looking for them.

PubSub

So let's get to the nitty gritty. I mentioned PubSub above, so I'll start with them. They're a relatively new kid on the search block, but unlike the others (Google, Yahoo!, etc) PubSub focuses exclusively on 'future search'. It's real simple to get started on PubSub - the homepage has a textbox where you're invited to "create a free PubSub subscription".

Say you want to keep up with the latest news and blog posts on the All Blacks rugby team (I have to use a New Zealand search!). Enter "all blacks" (with the quote marks) into PubSub and it sets up the search. The only drawback for PubSub currently is that often you have to wait a while for results to appear. e.g. it displayed this message for my "all blacks" query: "Right now, we are matching your subscription against millions of new information items as they are created." It asks me to either bookmark the page (how Web 1.0!), subscribe to the page in an RSS Aggregator, or download their browser sidebar tool. This post is all about subscribing to searches using RSS, so I'll go with option 2.

You subscribe to the feed by copying the URL into your favourite RSS Aggregator. Note: I've had problems with some PubSub feeds in Bloglines - but rather than detail it here, because it may actually be a Bloglines issue, I'll email PubSub. 

I've personally found PubSub's search feeds to produce the best quality links - consistently. Which I think is a credit to their search algorithms, whatever those might be. The one thing they could improve on is the subscription process. Because the results are often not immediate, it can be confusing for the user to have to wait a few hours for things to happen.

Blogdigger and Feedster

Blogdigger and Feedster are two other blog search engines that offer topic RSS feeds. With Blogdigger, simply enter your search term and the results page has a "Subscribe to this Search" orange RSS button in the top right corner. It's the same procedure in Feedster - enter your search and look out for the orange 'XML' icon in the top right corner to subscribe to that search. Kudos to both Blogdigger and Feedster for having a simple subscription process.

delicious

del.icio.us is another great tag feeds service. Unfortunately it doesn't have a search interface (surely that's the highest priority feature on its development To Do list?), nevertheless it's easy to find the tags that interest you. Simply enter e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/allblacks into your browser (that one currently has only 1 item in it as of this date!). Alternatively, have a browse around delicious - especially the popular page - and hunt out the tags that interest you. To subscribe to a tag, look for an orange 'RSS' icon at the bottom of the page - and as usual, save it to your favourite RSS Aggregator.

Bloglines

If you're a Bloglines user, then there's a good tag feed service integrated into Bloglines. Look for the Bloglines search box, enter your query, then click the "Subscribe to this search" button on the results page.

MSN

Another one I've been testing is the beta MSN Search. It has a promising piece of functionality named "Search Builder", which enables you to filter results. But I have to say MSN has produced mixed results for me. My search feed for "web 2.0" has thrown up mostly old links - sometimes downright ancient in Web terms (pre 2004 Web 2.0 conference!). Maybe this has been improved in the live version of MSN Search... In any case, once again look for an orange 'RSS' button at the bottom of the results page to subscribe to a search.

Google Alerts

Google has a recently added 'future search' feature...of sorts. It's called Google Alerts and you can find it by doing a Google News search. Look at the bottom of the results page and you'll notice a textual message like so: "New! Get the latest news on all-blacks with Google Alerts."

If you have a Gmail account, then it gives you the option of subscribing to the search via Gmail. You can subscribe to a search on news and/or the Web (why then don't they add a link to this service on Google Web search result pages?). Apparently you can use a non-Gmail email address, but you have to sign up for a Google Account. It's a neat service, but why not add RSS functionality hmm Google?

Technorati

Of course let's not forget Technorati :-) They have a keyword-tracking service called "watchlists", which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds once you've signed up as a member. Technorati recently introduced tags, but they don't offer RSS feeds for them as of this date.

Summary

Those are just some of the services available for doing tag or topic searches and subscribing to them in RSS. There are others out there too, e.g. Findory (which I signed up for today).

The general pattern for all these sites is to enter a search as you normally would, then look for an orange 'RSS' or 'XML' icon (they're interchangeable in the blogging world) in either the top-right of the page or at the bottom. Click on the orange icon and save the URL to your fave RSS Aggregator. Welcome to the Age of Topic Feeds!