The Web is Broken...

I spent a few minutes browsing the content on https://blogs.msdn.com yesterday and noticed that the MSN Direct service had been updated (that's the service that provides data to "SPOT" watches) - you can now select upto two watch faces to be downloaded to your watch (which is cool).

But... How would I know that this service had been updated without visiting the https://direct.msn.com web site, signing in using my passport and then checking on whether there were new services... The web site doesn't support RSS, and I didn't receive an e-mail with a notification of the update - which isn't surprising, you wouldn't expect to get an e-mail for every web page update, your inbox would be flooded very quickly.

This is an issue though, there is information out there that I'm interested in, and I want to be informed when there's something new or interesting, tripping over someone else's blog posting is one way to get the information, but it's not ideal - the same issue exists of course with files being dropped onto a server/share - how do I get notification of the change ? - Google is great at searching the web, but do I want to ping Google every day with a host of keywords to see if there's something new that I'm interested in, probably not... I'm thinking there has got to be a better way, RSS is cool, but is not exposed on all web sites...

I was thinking about writing an RSS feed tool for Windows CE devices - would it be even remotely interesting to get RSS data from a Windows CE device which contained custom status information, memory load, running processes, and any other custom data you wanted to expose from a device ?

- Mike