CornerScreen Networks: RSS meets Pointcast

Let me make some assertions leading up to an application idea I call CornerScreen Networks that I believe will add a lot of utility to the online experience.

RSS has made it systematic for both content producers to syndicate their content and for consumers to aggregate their feeds of interest. At the same time, with so much really good, specialized content available online, separating “signal” from “noise” has never been a bigger challenge.

Meanwhile, given the multiplicity of discrete content types now available (think: blogs, photos, podcasts, videos, news), a whole new category of sites are beginning to pop up that provide improved ways of organizing each type of content. Flickr is a great example where by enabling users to add tags and notes to photos, and by making that metadata searchable, a more than the sum of the parts experience has been created with respect to photo sharing.

In my opinion, this trend is just beginning, and new apps, or perhaps more accurately, meta-apps, will emerge that hook into and extend these specialized content portals and syndicated content feeds. One such example is a Flickr-related tag browser that an interactive design firm has built which creates a hyperbolic photo tree sorted according to Flickr tags. Further, there are already a number of RSS readers available, like NewsGator, and Apple is doing some interesting stuff with Dashboard.

While all of this has been going on, a bunch of new online advertising networks have emerged, like AdBrite and the ubiquitous Google AdSense that are systems which contextually align targeted ads with relevant content. By doing so, they have provided both a great way for web sites of all sizes to make money and for advertisers to generate more qualified leads than with traditional search engine related ads.

Enter CornerScreen Networks. CornerScreen Networks leverages the emergence of three trends -- user-defined RSS feeds, enhanced tools for organizing online content and Google-style advertising networks -- and unifies them within a slide viewer application that runs in a corner of your computer screen.

The premise, which takes its inspiration from PointCast, the innovative but ultimately doomed consumer “push” client software innovator, has the following attributes from a user utility perspective.

First off, it’s tuned for the short attention-span generation. It takes every topic and underlying feed of interest and presents them in a rolling “slide presentation” format. If you see a “slide feed” of interest, you can click on it, and the full content loads in your browser. What this means is that you can have hundreds or even thousands of items fed to you throughout the day, and only “nibble” when an item captures your interest. Contrast that with a typical RSS reader where more than a handful of feeds quickly become overwhelming.

Second, the approach lends itself quite naturally to the contextual advertising network model since a portion of the slides can automatically be allocated to ads. As a consumer, I am much more likely to click on an ad of interest if it is both non-disruptive and relevant. Arguably, as such targeted ads are an algorithmic reflection of not just a single web page but my aggregate interests, they should be even more relevant to me.

Third, such an application lends itself to further personalization through play lists. By play lists, I mean the ability to create a customized set of feeds that I am interested in viewing. Perhaps in the morning, I am only interested in technology and business oriented news feeds so I load up that play list. In the afternoon, it’s entertainment and general topics of interest. At the end of the day, it’s the community calendar of interesting events, people connections and stuff for sale. Even better, if I can share these play lists with friends and like minds, the model becomes viral.

To my knowledge, while Tiger has a new RSS-enabled screensaver and Microsoft offers a RSS Screen Saver Starter Kit in C# Express, nobody has connected the dots along the lines I am suggesting.

Would you use it? Does it sound compelling? What am I missing or forgetting?