I was a little sorry to see that Trellix was shut down as of the 15th. Really you could tell for years that it wasn’t going to make it, but longtime readers of this blog might remember that the original publishing system for it was the first version of the Trellix web publisher, and even before it could publish to the web I really liked Trellix. It came out somewhere around 1994-1995 and was initially a novel text editor that combined some notions of nonlinear/hypertext editing with aspects of powerpoint style presentation stuff. I loved the original PC only version. When they made absolutely no dent in MS Word’s dominance of word processing the tool morphed into a desktop web publishing tool geared towards the novice user or someone who wanted ease of use over features. When that didn’t work out the sold that product to Globalscape, where it lives on as CuteSite Builder. Unfortunately they haven’t been updating it for years and it’s basically not worth much now. Meanwhile Trellix the company worked as a middleware vendor selling to web hosting companies, taking some of the ideas from the original Trellix and incorporating them in a browser-based web content editor. They seemed to be doing ok, selling their services to big hosting companies like Tripod and at one point bailing out Blogger, but I guess that business plan didn’t work out either and they were bought out by another hosting company, which let the last of the original Trellix staff go a couple of weeks ago.

It’s really a shame. Trellix had some interesting ideas about how to approach data management and publishing in the original Trellix app, and with Dan Bricklin behind it (he developed the first commercially successful spreadsheet – Visicalc – among other things) it seemed like they had they potential to build an interesting and useful new toolset.

If anyone knows how to acquire a copy of the original Trellix word processor I’d be interested. I watch ebay for it and while the website stuff shows up regularly, I’ve never caught the original Trellix for sale.

If you’re interested in the subject, Dan Bricklin himself keeps a weblog which he updates regularly and which has a lot of background material on the software he’s worked on and the companies he’s been involved with.

I’ve mentioned in the past how much I like theFeedDemon RSS reader from Bradsoft. One of the reasons I am so fond of it is the ‘watches’ feature it has – you can set watches on a collection of terms and phrases (say ‘New York Giants, NY Giants, Giants Football, Giants NFL), and it will automatically build you an RSS feed with links to any items it finds in all your RSS feeds that match on those terms. It’s extremely useful and makes it possible to much more quickly refine your RSS feeds for specific topics you’re following.

Unfortunately FeedDemon is Windows only and so far I haven’t encountered a mac or Linux RSS client that has a similar feature. If anyone knows of one please comment. Anyway, enter Newstrove.com. The site is a search engine that tries to one-up news.google.com with a massive index of news from around the world. The site also has a very handy feature similar to FeedDemon though – look to the right side of the page near the top for the build your own topics link. Build your custom RSS feed, then copy it into your favorite RSS reader. You’re good to go with the same sort of news ‘watches’ that FeedDemon provides.

The downside is that this is a server-based system. Personally I’d prefer it be client based for performance reasons, but on the positive it does expose a lot more feeds to your search terms than the client-based one does.

Google needs to get on top of this stuff. They could do a masterful job with this. And while they’re at it they should add beysian analysis to the feeds, so that instead of seeing 120 links to posts covering whatever the media buzz dujour is (8 dead in iraq!) I see 1 aggregate feed for that topic. This is the next step in the evolution of browsing information space in my opinion, and it’s actually critical – even with RSS the situation is a total overload in terms of the voulme of content I would like to be able to look through compared to what I can reasonably manage.

I’ll return to this subject again, as I want to touch on email and usenet as other components in this information space, and I want to return to the visualization systems liketouchgraph and some of the tool prototypes like MIT’s Haystack and the OSAF’s Chandler. None of these is hitting all the bases yet but folks are working on this stuff. I feel like a drowning man waiting for a life preserver, and they haven’t cut a hole in the middle yet 😉 But at least as I said, there’s progress.

Bought music at the iTunes Music Store and want to move it to a machine you haven’t blessed with a key? Now you can. Or more precisely, it’s now a lot easier to do. I wonder what it will take to convince the content companies that DRM simply does not work. There has never been a lock that can’t be picked is the short and simple way to put it. This fruitless quest to engineer the impossible is wasteful and it makes the consumer experience with the products using it suck, with a bewildering array of specifications and a lack of interoperability. Anyway, at least for the time being there’s another lockpick to bring to bear. You can grab the actual software here, mac and linux only, though apparantly if you’re clever you might be able to get it working under win32 using cygwin.