Say that ten times as fast as you can. I always wanted to write a headline so arcane you couldn't tell whether it was about sports or finance. That was before it got too hard to tell them apart anyhow, but never mind. This one translates to: the Pluck RSS Reader blog just tapped Chief Blogging Officer as its latest Feed of the Day -- and this has increased our hit count enormously. Within mere minutes of appearing on the Pluck blog, CBO overtook boeing boeing, Instapundit, Gizmodo, Metafilter, Sandhill Trek (Wisconsin), Allied (Sicily), Bag & Baggage (Cayman Islands), Halley's Comment (Ibiza), La Vache Qui Lit (France), and Kombinat! (Poland). Why, this is absolutely fabulous!

They're way smart over there at Pluck, too! Cheggidout...

Today's Feed of the Day - Chief Blogging Officer - is a "tongue-in-cheek hack on the proliferation of Chief Something-or-Other Officers in business these days." Written by Chris Locke, [who] is perhaps best known as an author of notable Internet-interested books, including: The Cluetrain Manifesto, Gonzo Marketing, and The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy® (I highly recommend checking out the descriptions for each book).

And naturally, my long-suffering underwriter, HighBeam Research, is credited with the excellent good sense (or execrably bad judgment) to have installed me in the web's first official CBO role. I would like to thank Mom and Dad, the Rolling Stones, Aunt Luella in Beefeater Notch, and of course The Academy...

from: The Dallas Morning News Technology Product-Review Column.
source: The Dallas Morning News, 10 June 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

Pluck, which made its debut last week, is a suite of mini-applications designed to make browsing more efficient. This free IE add-on is a quick download that adds four features: Pluck PowerSearch, Sharing, My Web and RSS Reader.

The PowerSearch allows you to filter information gathered via Google, Amazon and eBay. The RSS Reader introduces users to the joys of "real simple syndication," a way of keeping track of news and information as it is updated across the Web.

But Pluck's real strength is in its My Web bookmark manager, which lets users organize and add comments to links they grab during research.

Land on a page you want to save, and you simply "Pluck" it from the Net by clicking on a button in the IE toolbar. A dialogue box springs up. You can add comments, then store the data in a sidebar folder. Better yet, if you install Pluck in every computer you use, those folders are visible in each.

"It's nice to know that as you move from machine to machine, this stuff can follow you around," says [Pluck co-founder Andrew] Busey.

Actually, I find that last bit vaguely unsettling. But maybe that's just me. As for you, though, do have a look around...