All Headline News is a Web site that aggregates news stories from multiple sources. From their Web site: "All Headline News offers live updated news headlines in more than 300 categories collected from more than 3500 sources. Also offers a free news feed service for websites." The first cool thing about All Headline News is that I can get an RSS feed for any of their categories. The second cool thing is that these RSS feeds can be generated from a search. For example, here's an RSS feed that contains news items related to Mike Leavitt.

There are other people doing this on a smaller scale and Yahoo! has searchable News feeds, but this is largest effort I'm aware of.

Producing RSS from search results reminds me of something I read on Jon Udell's blog the other day:

Of course, the trend even within Microsoft Office is away from micromanaging storage by "dragging and dropping." Witness the search folders in Outlook 2003, which are intended to create virtual views along multiple dimensions so you don't have to manually build containment structures. The Outlook 2003 product manager, in fact, told me that he managed the whole product cycle in an undifferentiated inbox, creating no folders and moving no messages.

The search-based RSS feeds on this site are virtual views of the news headlines. I think there's more to this idea of not trying to categorize things, but simply create views into the data, files, emails, whatever. Its more flexible than hard coded categories and search has clearly won out on the Internet over categorization for this very reason. As the amount of stuff on my hard drive grows, why not apply the same principal there as well? From the RESTian standpoint, this is an example of Web services, and example of how standards enable intermediaries.