Quality newsmastering gear is finally appearing everywhere I turn. Last night I was out for dinner with Reid Conrad (former Extensibility) who has a fascinating product in development (version 1.0 - Mac only is already out) called Near-Time Flow. These tools facilitate individual researchers/publishers role of searching and collecting information that needs then to be aggregated, categorized, repurposed and published across multiple channels. Though we are very early into this game you can definitely start seeing the profile of these emergent news and content aggregators and publishing tools getting gradually better. Here is a new one that is just entered its Beta stage:

Brainchild of the Surfwax search engine Nextaris is a new (now in beta) search and publishing tool that functions as a personal/group Internet information toolkit. Nextaris provides the tools needed to effectively use information on the Web:

• one-click Search across major engines and information sources


• automatic tracking and accumulation of targeted news


• one-click capture of web pages/content to personal online folders


• secure sharing of folders -- access from anywhere at anytime


• simple 1-2-3 publishing; folders, blogs, or web pages


• easy creation of social networks / communities of interest


• private messaging -- virus- and spam-free

With Nextaris you can easily search a great number of search engines and directories, collect with one-click operations the results and clippings you are most interested in, track news items through specific filtering mechanisms, categorize and archive relevant content inside clearly labelled folders, publish all of the selected items you choose on the Web with the click of a button. There is quite a bit more to it than this, and many critical features (output to RSS and RSS agregation) are still missing, but this is the essence of a pioneering independent publisher/newsmaster service.

Nextaris offers all of these facilities in a single Web-based application that requires no software to be downloaded and installed. A free try-out account can be created in no time at all.

"It's pretty easy to find things on the Web these days...But it's not so easy
to capture, save and organize the information you find for later reference
offline..." Walter Mossberg, Wallt Street Journal, March 18, 2004

Kudos to Tom Holt for having pushed the envelope in the right direction.