TRACKLE: A COOL NEW TOOL FOR INFO-SURFING

I knew I was onto something.  J.D. Lasica knows way more about technology than I ever will, and he likes Trackle, too.

Marc Fest has done it again,” he writes, “with a tool that I'm increasingly using instead of RSS feeds. It's called Trackle, and it keeps track of up to 25 blogs or websites, sending you updates on a daily or hourly basis. You can set the frequency at, say, 8 am each day, or 8 am and 3 pm, or more often. In Trackle, all the graphics and typography is stripped away, leaving you with a plain-vanilla text feed of everything that has been updated since it last checked the page.  I find Trackle more convenient than RSS feeds because it combines all the pages you want into one long html email, complete with live hyperlinks. . . . [I]n the past I've felt that the dozens of updates on dozens of blogs throughout the day was too overwhelming to keep tabs on. (Cue throbbing temples.) Trackle helps me manage my day, keeping on top of conversations in the blogosphere, and in various media, about topics of interest. In that way it's more timely and provides more relevant results than Google Alerts.

F Marc, as you may know, is our webmaster.  You pay top dollar (I’m speaking of you here, not me; I am congenitally incapable of paying top dollar), you get the best.

DEMOCRATS ARE WIMPS

Writes a prominent Republican who will be voting for Kerry in November: “Look, I'm not saying ALL Democrats are worthless.  Paul Krugman is great.  So is that blogger Atrios, and certainly lots of activists and such.  But the ones holding office mostly seem pretty pitiful whiners.  Given what Bush and his people have done to America over the last couple of years---and adding in Clarke's recent revelations---the Democrats should be talking about sending the whole Administration to the gallows, and instead they're saying things like ‘George Bush isn't nearly as strong on National Security as he claims to be.’  Pathetic!”

AL FRANKEN STARTS WEDNESDAY

Well, one guy who’s not going to take it anymore is Al Franken and the new Air America Radio network.  Al’s daily 3-hour show, The O’Franken Factor (“sue me again, please, Bill!”), begins airing Wednesday in four major markets – New York (WLIB 1190AM), Chicago (WNTD 950AM), Los Angeles (KBLA 1580AM) and San Francisco (to be announced).

“I’m so happy that Air America Radio will be on in three battleground states, New York, Illinois and California….no wait…those aren’t battleground states. What the hell are we doing?” said Franken.

Click here for the programming schedule.