IceRocket is a jewel of a site that has slowly been improving. I highlighted it recently in my post on the state of blog search. Today they unveiled a cool new feature that blends tweets, blog posts, news stories, videos and images. The feature is called Ice Rocket Big Buzz. Founder Blake Rhodes pinged me about it earlier today. (A larger view of the above image is here)
IceRocket Big Buzz fills a void that we desperately need - a real-time view of news events and memes. This feature gets us closer to such a utopia by pulling together live web sources into a single page. Take, for example a newsy search for plane crash. As I write this post it's filling up with lots of very current information all about today's top news story. This includes videos from YouTube and images from Flickr. Plus you can track all of it via RSS with a link at the top right. Sounds like a dream for journalists.
This is a great first start. I would love to see the page automatically refresh and have a mobile version. In addition, an open API would be helpful too. That way, should I wish, I can add a feed from Friendfeed for items that users are only sharing there.
Still, I am glad to see that someone is out there trying to solve the live web search problem because, as Scoble shows today with the plane crash story, it's where the action is. Google is sleeping at the wheel here.
