I’ve always dreamed of RSS replacing email as a spam-free person-to-person communication device.

Adam Curry says it’s not possible, though I don’t see why anyone would believe him. I’ve never heard  or read Dave Winer talk about if this was possible.

For me, I originally thought a system of RSS+SSE might be possible for this, except for the fact that it would seem no better than email because of SPAM issues, so why bother?

I met Jim Moore at OPMLCamp a few months back and recently sent him a note. He’s using a service called Spam Snag to pro-actively stop SPAM.

I got a reply and had to click-through before my email and any subsequent emails got through.

It occurred to me that by building that into the protocol, we could create a better, stronger, faster messaging service right on top of RSS.

I’ll think on this some more. I did have some wine with dinner, so I may be missing an obvious  reason why this won’t be feasible.

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Jarvis notes the changing role of journalists:

A change of the role of journalists — and their relationship with the public — from owner sof the story to moderators, editors, enablers, and educators.

Networked news is good, but “SharedNews” is better. Well, that’s just a term I coined some time back to talk about two-way RSS or what might be called RSS Groups.

This is where everyone has access to a feed, much like an email or usenet group. It’s a more sophisticated way to structure a group blog, and it can be completely distributed. Check out SkinnyFarm for an example.

I’ll remind Jeff about a post he wrote about SSE , and I commented on it.

If RSS is two-way, like it can be, then networked news collaboration can be taken to a much higher level.

I’m digressing somewhat, because the real issue here is that news organizations must realize they need to approach the conversation from a peer level.

It’s no longer a lecture, where audience members must raise their hand to contribute. It’s one big dinner party, and no-one likes the guy who tries to dominate the conversation.

That’s why Dave Winer is right about exclusivity. There is an implicit understanding that we are all equal on the web, and any attempts to create a class system will fail. Exclusive 2.0 conferences are making the same mistake that the Old Regimes made.

It’s also why the user-generated content strategies of news organizations are driving me nuts.

By it’s nature, it’s treating the site-user as a lesser voice.

It’s as if newspapers think users will feel priveliged to get their stuff on the organization’s website.

While that may be somewhat true for the New York Times, I don’t think the local newspaper in many towns holds that kind of reverence, especially with the younger follks.

Their friends are more impressed with their MySpace page, than with your poorly designed, million dollar content management system.

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A lot of people say “River of News” is a preference.

River of News is a preference like a Microbrewed beer is. Once you’ve acquired a taste for it, you’ll never switch back to Bud.

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Chicago: http://chi.riverofjobs.com

LA: http://la.riverofjobs.com

SanFran: http://sanfran.riverofjobs.com

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This is New York river of jobs. Other cities and job category specific to come any day. API available if you are ineterested.

http://ny.riverofjobs.com/

In fact this is the whole web page. One Rest call:

note: no line break here. I was having trouble with Wordpress blowing out the template

include_once(’http://freecruiter.org/rest/?method=getFeedListItems
&format=html&countryid=1&stateid=33&cityid=1&jobid=0′);

For fun just change the format=html in the URL to format=rss and you’ve got the rss version of the river for yourself.

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My big push this week was for full-text feeds in the RSS feeds from all Tribune newspapers sites.

Not a new argument by any means but . . .(cue up quotable excerpt)
In the light of the blogosphere going apeshit over Dave’s “mobile river of news,” I think it’s more critical than ever that media companies stop clinging to the out-dated page-view model and begin offering full-text feeds.

Added: See what I mean? If we concentrate on relationships and not traffic, we will get paid more. Huh? The doctor uses a scalpel not a cave-man club. Whuh? The graduate student studies The Battle of Gettysburg, the 8th grader studies American History (And never gets past World War I). Is it clear now?

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Newsome counters a Jarvis post on Social Networks by saying he is singing to the choir :

As as far as niches go- the entire blogosphere is a niche. The tech blogosphere, where most of us hang out, would be a sub niche. A niche inside a sub-niche is not a niche. It’s a clique. That’s a quotable excerpt that will almost certainly not make its way up the mountain.

I don’t normally subscribe to the A-List argument, but it is true that, as in life, there are cliques in Social Networks.

Some are more enviable than others and some are more open to outside input than others.

But Kent has been linked to nearly a thousand times and I see Doc Searls and Dave Winer in that group.

Between both of my blogs, I’ve been linked to about one-tenth of that amount and linkers have included Jarvis, Searls and Winer.

I think they are doing an excellent job.

So is small the new big?

Yes, but look at it this way. I think it compliments Jarvis’s Law of Open Networks.
The Law of Network Fluidity: The number of working affinity groups within a social network should increase proportionately with its number of nodes. All nodes must be able to freely pass into and out of existing and new affinity groups.

If not, then you may have an A-list syndrome.One last point of clarity. I do not mean that a network cannot have a private or exclusive group. Just that there is no unintentional blockage that might signify a network design flaw or central control.

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UPDATE3 : Button is working.
UPDATE2 : Button not working. Hmm. Not sure what to do.
UPDATE : If you’d like to put the button on your blog as well, let me know and I’ll forward the code. matt-at-classyfeeds-dot-com

Dave Winer recently pointed to the sad story of theft against Donovan Watts .

I don’t know Donovan personally but he has donated time and code to the OPML community and myself so I thought I’d try to help.

It’s often awkward to ask for donations during hard times so I suggested he create a paypal but and I’d put it on my site. That way it’s mor like a benefit concert.

Please link to it and donate if you can . Thanks

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I found this Craig Barnes  of Attensa post about the River of News style aggregators very interesting. Since they have a great understanding of Attention in his company, it doesn’t surprise me that they want to apply that to NewsRivers in order to make our feed reading more efficient.
I’m not sure Craig gets river of news. I’m not quite sure I get it, but I’m a wee bit closer, methinks. But he does pose a good question of whether the river of news will  cause production slow down like email has.

Probably, but you can’t say that any reader has solved that one yet.

I guess he’s saying that he has some go-to blogs that he can’t miss, but others that are must reads.

I never know where the day’s gem will be. Sometimes Dave Winer has nothing for me and James Corbett does, other days it’s reversed.

I do think Craig confuses  the method of reading all your feeds, ordered by date, but in a three-pane window with a true news river that flows title, description, links and all into one pane. That makes a huge difference.
The River of News style of feed consumption leverages the best computing resource available. The human brain.
Without it, I scan headlines, but often click to find it wasn’t worth it after all.

On a side note, I’m glad to see Craig looking at Open Source . If you read this Craig, just go for it. Actually, I’d like to talk more about it with you later, cuz this post is done.

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