Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 16:40:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Ellen Maremont Silver <silver@songline.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Meerkat, An Open Wire Service, Scans Tech News

For Immediate Release
March 23, 2000

For Further Information Contact
Ellen Maremont Silver
(707)829-6514
silver@oreilly.com
http://www.oreillynet.com

Meerkat, An Open Wire Service, Helps Developers Scan The Technology
News

Sebastopol, CA--Meerkat, an open wire service designed to keep
developers on top of rapidly-changing technology news, has been
launched on the O'Reilly Network (http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/).
Meerkat organizes information, drawn from a wide variety of sites, by
channel, category and date.  

The wire service borrows its name from the Southern African Meerkats,
members of the mongoose family. Meerkats, being low on the food chain,
have to be careful when going about their daily business -- someone
always stands guard, scanning the horizon for anything that moves. "In
the technology community, we're like meerkats ourselves, trying to take
in everything about technology that might be important," explained
O'Reilly Network publisher Dale Dougherty.

Meerkat solves a common problem: how to notice when something has
changed on a Web site. This can be a difficult task for developers who
want to stay on top of many technologies. With Meerkat, it's possible
to know what's been published in the last hour, day, or month on a
variety of sites.  "Meerkat is an editorial tool that we use at the
O'Reilly Network to monitor the flow of information in technical
communities," said Dougherty. "It was so exciting that we decided to
open it to users." 

Tara Calishain is editor/publisher of ResearchBuzz, an online
newsletter for Net research. Calishain describes Meerkat's value: "It
aggregates so much information in one source, and it's so customizable.
It's also very specific; when you have a new search engine, you can't
tell when something has been changed. But with Meerkat, you can."

Meerkat is an aggregator of information from sites that support RSS
(Rich Site Summary), an XML format that supplies the title, description
and URL for stories created on the site. RSS was developed by Netscape
in 1999 as a way of drawing in content from the Web for use in its My
Netscape Network portal. It was later extended by Netscape and Dave
Winer of Userland. RSS is becoming increasingly popular as technology
sites share  headlines with other sites to draw traffic, and use RSS
feeds to link to related information.

ABOUT O'REILLY NETWORK, INC.
O'Reilly Network, created in Fall, 1999, is a wholly-owned subsidiary
of O'Reilly & Associates, a technical information company that is
recognized worldwide for its books, technical conferences, online
resources, and Internet software. O'Reilly Network's chief visionary is
publisher Dale Dougherty, who was one of O'Reilly & Associates' first
editors, the publisher of Global Network Navigator (the first Internet
portal and commercial website), and the publisher of Web Review.
O'Reilly & Associates is the definitive independent source of
information on the Internet, Java, programming, open source software,
Windows NT and UNIX.  

MORE INFORMATION
http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/meerkat; http://www.oreillynet.com;
http:// http://www.oreillynet.com/rss; http://www.researchbuzz.com

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