Ever since the Web was spun I've been looking for a better way to track the news.

I have created some in my time. I launched the Interactive Age Daily for CMP. I created the A-Clue.Com weekly newsletter.I like to think this blog helps.

But the raw material I use has changed constantly. Maybe that's a good thing, because some of my value as a journalist lies in my ability to dig through this raw material and give you the good stuff.

One of the early tools I liked was Newslinx. This was a collection of links to stories in various magazines on technology, eventually bought by Internet.Com.

It is, in a word, limited.

RSS is the tool we needed. Dave Winer has won a special place in computing history for creating it. The problem is that you depend on the intelliigence and goodwill of the author in describing what they've written. Not everyone is as smart as Dave Winer, nor do they all have his goodwill.

For a time I was a heavy user of Technorati, Blogdex and of Blogstreet. Trouble is neither has yet found a real business model, and without a business model your volunteers get exhausted and drop away.

What usually happens is you have a limited tool, created for a limited purpose (showing which blogs are getting the most links), and they just don't advance. Money is needed.

The result, I've seen with Newsgator, is that a keyword feed delivers a lot of junk. I inquired recently about "excluding" URLs from keyword feeds, to get rid of what I called "RSS spam." Well, you can't. Not with Newsgator. Not yet.

Russell Beattie is a big fan of Bloglines, now part of Ask Jeeves. Jeeves brings money to the party (for the first time) and this has me hopeful. But so far, I haven't been able to get good service from Bloglines. Might be me. I'm sure they'd agree with that. But operator error isn't a good thing to take to your investors.

I think what we need is a better definition of the problem.

I want to be able to enter a keyword and find out both what the news is there, and what people are writing about it.

Shouldn't really be hard. RSS is now commonly used by many reputable news sources (and by the New York Times). I want the crap and the ads stripped away. I want stories ranked by how many people are interested in them, and whether they actually provide new information. Oh, and reverse by date.

I'd pay for that. And I think a lot of other people would, too.