I really want a standalone autodetection tool. As I surf, it will:

• live in the Windows system tray
• parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
• verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
• write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
• display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
• push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.

By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:

• Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
• Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
• Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
• Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.

If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you've actually seen, but more context - especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.

I'd also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:

• Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
• Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
• Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
• Rich media (sound, video, flash files)  

so I can review and bring them into other software.

There should be programming specs, so they know how to find the detective's journals, and check if they've been updated with fresh discoveries. I didn't include a "new headlines" balloon or ticker in the detective's features. The detective isn't a newsreader.

The detective should listen to your newsreaders too. Your newsreaders should also push the locations of your subscription lists ("you can find what Phil is reading at http://...") to the detective. This way the detective can optimize its reports by checking your subscriptions, then excluding them from discoveries. 

Let me browse and edit my discoveries in a human-usable form. I may want to delete items from my history before sharing them with a newsreader.  

I have an identity that lives across multiple computers and cell phones. I'll have detectives on each. My detectives should be able to confer and harmonize their discoveries. I may have multiple users on any computer, so detection prefs and journals should be aware of user profiles.

What's the business case?

• Strategy: Environmental Awareness. What's the cost of missing that a trusted feed has moved? That a key customer/competitor/regulator has a new feed? What if we made our collective surfing of the Internet into a competitive analysis tool, each person contributing their view of the world? With detectives on everyone's desk, we're less likely to be surprised, more likely to catch new opportunities, and be smarter as a group than our competitors.
• IT: Enterprise System Integration with Newsreaders. We're creating feeds of all sorts of information, including RSS of our SAP transactions. Many of these feeds will be customized for a specific context ("here's the RSS for orders Mary should approve.") The detective does away with error-prone cutting and pasting, automating the process of "I want to follow up on this". These feeds will drive attention to workflow and process. Some of the feeds will trigger people to write about specific items in team and project weblogs, improving communication.

I'll pay $20 retail for this.

Assuming you have an intranet blog server and either a server based news aggregator or desktop newsreaders, what would you pay for a 100 user site license?

Do you want one?