The other day I wrote about how the RSS aggregator I’ve been using to efficiently surf the web brought important tasks to my attention. This is, of course, not much of an insight. Aggregating things is what aggregators do.
Only they don’t really, yet they work mainly on finding things, with some options for responding. But the aggregator should be able to shift some items from the stream of stuff that gets scanned and read and discarded, into tasks, into the calendar, into the collaborative bookmarking system. This got me daydreaming about writing an aggregator that would allow you to read an item and turn it into a task, or a attach it to the calendar as a reminder; to name two things that I want to do not just with tasks, but with web stuff.
And then my aggregator reminded me about Chandler, an ambitious open source undertaking to build an information manager, which is apparently well on the way to being useful. The versions I downloaded to try on this OS X machine won’t run, and I don’t have time to muck around with them, but I will stay tuned - and try to remember not to get all carried away about writing Chandler myself.
Maybe one of the Microsoft Outlook based aggregators would come closest to Chandler now?