From Corey Doctorow:



"Timo, it's pretty straightforward. Meerkat aggregates something like 2500 different RSS (headline syndication) channel, that are clustered in categories. Anyone who operates a Website can publish its ongoing contents as a channel. People who've signed up to put their feeds in Meerkat have chosen a category for their channels, and that what you see in the "Categories/Channels" window. Choose which channels you want to see feeds from, choose how many hours' worth of content you want (Meerkat gets thousands of new headlines/day), using the "Show Me" window. Optionally, you can filter the results by entering keywords to either include or exclude from the headlines using the "Search For" box. Once you've told Meerkat which channels, how far back, and which keywords to look for, click the "Refresh" button and the page will reload to show the results, 50 headlines at a time. You can click on a headline to see the story. The other columns (Source, Category and Date) show you more info that you can use to refine your settings (for instance, if a certain source returns awful results, you can eliminate that from the channels you want to see). There's lots of advanced stuff, too -- you can create an account, which lets you save "Profiles" (settings for different purposes) and "Mobs" (collections of links that you want to save). Is that clear?"



I owe him $1.00 for that.