Scott Johnson – The people I read are my intelligent agents

Intelligent agency.

Buzz is on the phone, quoting something Feedster‘s Scott Johnson said over dinner in Boston last night, about the RSS+aggregator-enabled blog world. What Scott said (Buzz says) was,

The people I read are my intelligent agents.

Context… Remember the “intelligent agents” scare from a few years back? (Wonder how much VC money got wasted on that one?) Never happened. (Not in a big way, anyhow. Are you using one now? I mean, in addition to the ones you read in your aggregator? See what I mean?)

Now, thanks to RSS, it’s happening.

Makes me think back to Doug Engelbart’s thinking about augmenting human intelligence, and how the best augmentation in fact comes from other connected human beings.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Buzz and I had the same conversation earlier this morning. Scott has a wonderfully succinct way of describing the power of these new technologies combined in interesting ways. I’m no Scoble, but I do manage to track almost 300 weblogs and newsites using RSS (including Scoble of course). The power of RSS is that the news comes to me filtered by all of those bright minds, who are themselves feeding off of other bright minds. Add tools like Feedster on top of that and you start to have the first tools that promise to help fight the problems of attention.

Trying to eliminate the people from the mix was clearly the wrong approach. Forging a better partnership between people and machines is the trick.