Brent Simmons, with a brilliant app idea:

Ten years ago or more we had several blog-specific search engines and services: Technorati, BlogBridge, and others.

One of the great things about these services was not just being able to search for something but being able to set up _persistent* searches: that is, you’d get a search as an RSS feed, and in your feed reader you’d get results from all over the place on the thing you’re searching for.

In the obvious and common cases, you’d set up searches for people linking to your blog, writing about the apps you work on, mentioning the place where you work, and mentioning you.

I’d like to see something like this for today, but where the scope is just the Apple/Mac/iOS community. It would crawl the obvious sites (such as Daring Fireball and Loop Insight) and it would crawl the many blogs and microblogs that make up the community.

I would absolutely love a service like this. I’d like to see it in the form of an iOS app, but that might not be the right fit — after all, it is designed to notifying you when websites mention your search term. Building it as a web service would be more than suitable, though, and it could offer integration with IFTTT or Zapier to give it more reach and allow users to bend the service to their will.