Taming your own river of news

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software

Taming your own river of news

by Grant Robertson Feb 19th 2007

Download Squad readers are tech-heavy web users. If you're like me, you probably generate quite a bit of RSS (maybe even without conscious awareness). Del.icio.us, your blog, your Flickr stream, etc, etc, ad nausea. We're at a total saturation point for the incoming data streams we deal with on a daily basis and, since there's no sign of the dataflow slowing down, we're forced to look for better ways to deal with it all. Necessity, after all, is the mother of all invention.

Emily Chang writes, "After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about"

This opens some amazing possibilities. Could your aggregator watch all your friends streams of RSS data and say, find the date and time of an upcoming party... then schedule it automatically? Stowe Boyd writes, "This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. [...] we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into."

Personal aggregation. Melding the content you create into one unified stream which can flow over anyone you want to allow to follow what you're putting out. Although Stowe's points take the idea to another level -- enabling applications to watch and deal with the river automagicly -- Chang's point must come first. Our data generation in the current model is more akin to tributaries of flow, the next step is to unite them into our personal river. Panning and mining that self-generated river for info-gold.

This seems like an obvious target for some rockin' open source app, Wordpress plugin, Yahoo! Pipe, etc.. but a cursory search says I'm going to have to roll my own if I want to hang with the cool kids. Where's the open source content flow aggregation system for the everyman? And once we have it, what do we do with it?

Tags: aggregation, content agregation, ContentAgregation, emily chang, EmilyChang, personal content aggregation, PersonalContentAggregation, river of news, RiverOfNews, RSS, stowe boyd, StoweBoyd

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

hubs said 5:24PM on 2-19-2007

have you seen the "lifestreams" that have been showing up on a few blogs? here is mine: http://www.artifacting.com/blog/life/

jmalenko said 6:16PM on 2-19-2007

I'm still waiting for us to get out of the stone age with respect to forums, mailing lists and blog comments. Why do I have to go a hundred different sites in order to keep up with conversations? Why aren't they aggregated?

There are many things wrong with Usenet, but it knows that it is a messaging system. I can score, filter, archive, and search posts. Everything is aggregated for me. I've got proper text editing capabilities, a unified interface and everything aggregated for me. I can follow and respond to many conversations conveniently in one place.

Why don't we have a proper unified messaging system in 2007? Why didn't anyone make Usenet 2?

yhancik said 8:10PM on 2-19-2007

Have you ever heard of Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, just like Suprglu (example : http://yhancik.suprglu.com/) or Ziki (http://www.ziki.com/people/yhancik) ?

There you can add your rss feed of comments collected via http://www.cocomment.com

Richard said 4:55AM on 2-20-2007

You might want to look at http://pipes.yahoo.com It's not a bad toolkit for 're-mixing' RSS feeds.

Narendra said 11:14AM on 2-20-2007

this is what 30 Boxes is all about :-)

Paulo Diniz said 11:14AM on 2-20-2007

I really agree with some of the points here. We need a complete "information overflow" app, that acts as feed aggregator, as a tagging-centered (as opposed to hierarchical) Personal Information Manager/Note-taker and also as a blogging client, all in a same integrated pack.

I have a blog dedicated to this concept:
http://notariussystem.blogspot.com

Zelidar said 11:20AM on 2-20-2007

Let us not forget Google Reader. It manages all my news, blogs and podcast feeds in a simple and efficient way.

http://www.google.com/reader

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