Great News! Andrew Grumet over at MIT has taken a giant step towards one of the hottest applications of RSS on the horizon - the video aggregator.  ReadRSS, released today in version 0.4d, is a nifty piece of software that sits in your TiVo and allows it to download and compile video feeds contained in RSS streams. You can even schedule the thing to record certain feeds at certian times.

We aren't quite to the point we had imagined, when we get home from work to find a couple of hours of aggregated video waiting for us including Strong-Bad, the weather, the Adam Curry video feed, live independent reporting from wherever the battlezone is at that time, a video postcard from an ex-student in China, the Glenn Reynolds Show, snippets containing every mention of "Ecuador" "Big Tent Movement" "artificial intelligence" and anything else on my list of filtered buzzwords which has appearred on the major news channels over the previous 24 hours, buffered with a minute or so of air time on each end, BluntTV from Canada, and maybe some additional streams we can't imagine because they haven't been invented yet.

But anyway, out hat's off to Andrew, and when we see him we want to be the first to tell him - What took you so long? No, really, Great work! Now all we have to do is

a) buy a Tivo ($150 and up)
b) subscribe to a service ($13 a month and up)
c) find RSS feeds with video enclosures, and
d)figure out how to tell it what to do

The Dowbrigade trembles at the very thought of these daunting tasks. Yet the goal of the quest merits the effort: our dreamed-of video aggregator. And luckily, we have some VERY smart friends who can help even a digital idiot like the Dowbrigade to figure these things out....

Check it out at Andrews Blog