The O’Reilly Network this week added Meerkat to its portal for
developers interested in open and emerging technologies.
Meerkat is an open wire service designed to keep developers on top of
rapidly changing technology news. The service organizes information, drawn
from a wide variety of sites, by channel, category, and date.
Meerkat’s key feature is that it lets the user know when something has
changed on a Web site, making it easier for developers to stay abreast of
many technologies. Using Meerkat, developers can determine what has been
published in the last hour, day, or month on a variety of sites.
“Meerkat is an editorial tool that we use at the O’Reilly Network to
monitor the flow of information in technical communities,” said Dale
Dougherty, publisher of the O’Reilly Network. “It was so exciting that we decided to open it to users.”
Meerkat aggregates information from sites that support RSS (Rich Site
Summary), an XML format that supplies the title, description and URL for
stories created on the site. RSS was developed by Netscape in 1999 as a way
of drawing in content from the Web for use in its My Netscape Network
portal. RSS is becoming increasingly popular as technology sites share
headlines with other sites to draw traffic, and use RSS feeds to link to
related information.
The O’Reilly Network, created last fall is a wholly-owned subsidiary
of O’Reilly & Associates. O’Reilly & Associates provides information on the
Internet, Java, programming, open source software, Windows NT, and Unix.