Nextaris, Web-Searching Information-Sharing News-Tracking Application Thingie

If you've read this newsletter for any length of time you've plumped to the idea that I don't like portals, and I didn't like them when they were all the rage back in the late 90s. I found them annoying. I just didn't see the value in seeing the weather and sports scores and traffic and news bits and other snippets of information gathered into some cattlecar of datapoints, bursting at the seams, festooned with flashing banner ads.

But I don't mind portals of applications. That is, several complementary applications put together in one site. And that's sorta what Nextaris ( http://www.nextaris.com ) is. From the people who brought you Surfwax (DISCLOSURE TIME: I consulted for them some in 2001, but neither money nor stock nor fruit baskets come my way today; I will not and do not benefit from covering their products), Nextaris is part search engine and part news tracker and part Weblog and part e-mailer and I can imagine it being very, very useful for group projects.

There are two versions, free and subscription, but you have to register for both. (Subscription gives you 100 MB of disk space, free gives you 20. That seems to be the big difference.) After you have registered and agreed to a terms of service that looks like it's about 40,000 words, you're asked to pick some topics of interest. I picked Computers, Health, and Video Games.

Once you've done all that, you'll go to a menu screen with a ton of options. You can search a variety of engines (unlike a meta-search engine, the results open in new pages. You're encouraged to use Nextaris' bookmarklets to easily capture the data you want to save. More about that momentarily. Anyway, you can also search news sources, or rather enter queries for news you want to track. You'll get e-mail notifications when there are new matches for your queries, but it looks like you'll have to go to the site to get 'em.

Now, you can search and you can find news relevant to your interests. Why are you doing all this? The point of Nextaris is to organize and share information -- the gathering is a secondary thing. Go to your Folders tab and you'll see existing folders, but you can also add your own folders, add files, add URLs, annotated them, etc etc etc. You can have private folders of data, or you can share your folders with a group. (Nextaris has an internal e-mail system for people using this as part of a group.)

What I like about Nextaris is that once you've got the information, you can Do Stuff with it. You can publish it in 'Blog format. The information you specify is published on their site using an URL which incorporates your user name. If you're deeply into information gathering and you don't want to have your own Web site, this would be an awesome way to do it. As you might imagine, the first thing I asked about was RSS feeds in conjunction with the 'Blog. They're in development, I was told, but not yet around.

If you were a) someone who wanted a place to gather information and publish it without noodling with your own site, or b) were part of a group that wanted a central free place to do information gathering, this is definitely a service for you to check out.

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