RSS tool sends out alerts for TV, radio
Search company Blinkx debuts a service that notifies people of new content on over 30 broadcast channels.
The service lets people type in a search term and choose from more than 30 broadcast channels to receive notifications on that topic. For example, users can create a "SmartFeed" button on weather in San Francisco and receive RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, alerts whenever that topic comes up in the broadcast channels the person selected.
Blinkx's Broadcast Web site uses voice recognition software to transcribe video and audio data into text for full-text searching. The broadcast channel lets people search from a wide variety of radio, television and sources including the BBC, CNN and HBO.
Web publishing standard RSS is emerging as a popular tool for alerting subscribers when new information has been posted to publications and blogs. Podcasters have also been using it to notify people of new audio content.
Blinkx recently unveiled a way to search inside podcasts and video blogs, which are blogs that use video as their primary presentation format. The privately held company also offers software for searching all kinds of data on desktops and the Web using contextual search technology, rather than keywords like other search engines use.