River of News

Blackberry showing the newsriver

Photo from River of Treo on Flickr, this image is showing the newsrivers on a blackberry phone.

The Rivers of News article from Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine blog links to Dave Winer’s ‘news rivers’. These ‘news rivers’ are mobile friendly plain HTML 2.0 Web pages that just list the most recent news items posted to either the BBC News site or the New York Times site. These are awesome pages when read at length, the sheer randomness of it all shorn of all context or backgound. Many comments suggest other sources of mobile news, and suggest that filtering of feeds around interests would have a higher value added. I was more interested in the (lack of) design in Winers page.

As Andy W and my other regular readers (Hi Mum) will know, I’ve been thinning down the templates on this blog. The theme switcher on the navigation panel will give you a choice of theme and I’m moving to simpler and less ‘designed’ themes for default presentation (you can still have the css and graphics if you prefer them).

What I love about the news rivers pages is that little orange square. Click on that and you get meta-content. I’ve been thinking about a split page for ages (navigation on the second page, content up front with a single icon with an arrow) and now Winer has gone and given me permission. I’ll have a code up this weekend….

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