Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?

I think Jookster is a great idea, and even if it turns out that it is one of the many startups that will go belly up in this boom, I'm confident that the underlying ideas it embraces will be something that we are using for years to come.

I couldn't be more excited about the work being done over at ZapTXT, a great service that filters your selected RSS feeds for keywords and will send you an IM, email or SMS whenever new results appear.  Now the service is answering the call of users who want to filter multiple RSS feeds bundled into an OPML file all for the same query without having to repeat set-up for each feed filtered.  No idea when that feature will be available, but that's what the good folks at ZapTXT are working on. 

Will this pull them ahead of competitors in the space like immedi.at and Rasasa?  We'll see!

Issue tracking in general and reputation tracking in particular is an important part of the Web 2.0 world.  If it's all about the conversation, then it's important to know when something of interest to you (like you) is being discussed.

Andy Beal has written up a good introduction to the concept, including resources on where to subscribe to search feeds for your keywords.  One resource he pointed to that I had never seen before was BoardTracker, a search engine across thousands of forums and bulletin boards.  RSS feeds included. 

Many of the other search resources he lists can be captured all at once using MonitorThis.  I would also add to the list that it's a good idea to watch how people tag your site in del.icio.us.  Unfortunately, though this bookmarklet does that well when clicked on, the del.icio.us RSS feed for my personal site's URL doesn't validate and can't be added to my feed reader.  Oh well, just one more thing that's broken about del.icio.us.

Anyone else have issue or reputation tracking suggestions?

Update: Steve Rubel (see yesterday's post on Walmart) will be doing a live chat Thursday at the Washington Post on just this topic.