Remember Megatrends?

John Naisbitt and a herd of library assistants basically looked at news stories from all over the world in order to divine underlying trends -- they extrapolated the recent past to describe the future.

He made a bundle.

Now a man named Charles McLean, working at an outfit called the Denver Research Group, has updated the concept using RSS feeds. David Ignatius (pictured, in his official portrait) has the story.

The title of the piece is "Google With Judgement," a title suggested by McLean. What he does is monitor 7,000 political sources (probably everything with an RSS feed) in an attempt to catch trends before they start.

McLean is cagey on his specific methodology. He's trying to sell the process for big bucks to corporations that need to know what the market's thinking quickly enough to act on it. But it sounds like he's databased a bunch of feeds and learned to distill their meaning pretty accurately.

For example, McLean believes the real turning point of the campaign so far was Kerry's September 20 speech in Philadelphia where he laid out his Iraq strategy.

Here is the "nut graph" of Ignatius' column:

"The uneasy voters want to hear how it's all going to be okay," McLean explains. "They've been waiting for something to grab hold of with Kerry. Bush's greatest strength was his sense of assurance, comfort, confidence -- but his performance Thursday took all three away. All Kerry had to do was stand there with a catcher's mitt."

It impresses me that Ignatius did some real reporting on this column. The Denver Research Group has no Web site that I can find. He's not personally mentioned on Google. Whatever your politics, or your opinions on McLean, give Ignatius his props.

If this column proves nothing else, it's that shoe leather can still beat the best computer when there's a story to be had. It's not what Ignatius meant to say but it's a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.