Sep

IS RIVER OF NEWS ENOUGH?

For what seems similar to most years I was a waste voice in the wilderness, murmur at initial “River of News” afterwards vocalization some-more loudly and eventually cheering from the rooftops, but people wouldn’t listen. Developers patterned their “news readers” after email programs. Each feed was a box, and similar to a mail module it would discuss it you how most unread messages there were. “This is wrong!” I would contend — RSS is not mail.

Well in 2006 or so, things incited in the alternative citation and rivers showed up everwhere. They call them streams, lifestreams, etc, but they’re all the same simple idea. Park yourself on the riverbank and watch the headlines upsurge by. If you skip something, not to worry, if it’s critical a little brand brand brand new story will impute to it.

Then an engaging experiment, the AnnArbor.com switched the home page to be a river. Wonderful, fantastic, futuristic. A prolonged time ago I likely the front page of each headlines site would be a river. But right away Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab asks, basically, is a River enough? Do you need a little alternative make up to cling to the headlines on? Yes, imho, you do.

The subject comes up on Twitter, when you wish to know the context of a tweet, since infrequently people fibre them together. 140 characters isn’t sufficient to demonstrate a full idea, so you write 3 or four. By the time you’re at series four, someone has customarily tweeted you behind asking what you mean. The answer is in #1 or #2 of the 4-tweet sequence. If you answer the question, you’ll only breed some-more questions, so you goal the chairman is savvy sufficient to click on your name and review your full stream to get the context.

In the 1980s I ran a complement called LBBS on an Apple II in my vital room. We had the expect same problem, and found a tidy solution. At initial the make up was particularly hierarchic. The sysop, me, would begin a contention area, and users would post questions or assertions as first-level subs. People would respond, and those would crop up in retreat chronologic sequence as second-level subs. Responses to those would be third-level and so on. This was an early threaded contention system. But how to find the brand brand brand new stuff? For which I combined what I called a Msg Scanner, a reverse-chronolic browser which abandoned structure. It would keep a bookmark for each user, a high-water-mark, and when you’d burst in to the scanner that’s where you’d start. You’d keep attack Next until you reached the newest message. And here’s the cool thing — when you longed for to see the context, only sort / and you’d switch over in to the hierarchic structure, on the same message.

News will work the same way, solely someone who is learned at organizing things will figure out where each square goes in the hierarchy. This will yield the context, and you will additionally be means to find out What’s New.

Anyone who used the LBBS in 1981, that’s twenty-eight years ago, will understand, but in this universe it’s still a brand brand brand new idea.