[Someone want to explain what agents are in the software domain?]
DKF - Agents are pieces of software that act on behalf of something else like a user or another agent. Mind you, the term usually feels fairly null to me: "We want to jazz this extremely boring piece of software up for when we do the presentation to the MD, so let's call it a User Somnolence Agent!"
So for instance, if you have a cron job which gathers web pages up and formats them for you to read in the morning, that would count as an 'agent'?
See http://agents.umbc.edu/ for a newsletter which summarizes on a regular basis various internet references to agent technologies.