Some talk today on Buzz Machine about Dave Winer’s mobile RSS hack of BBC (and Times) News. This seems to suck in and combine latest updates to feeds in one long stream. I agree with some of the comments about it being a reinvention of the wheel of the pre-existing BBC mobile headline update services as this just seems to elevate the importance of “new” stories over any other criteria. Do I really want every update of every story from any news source? No. I twould want to filter these and maybe this will come later down the line.
Doc Searls makes the distinction between this as a “source” of info rather than a “website” which I think is interesting, although the unmediated source is less useful than one I can mediate. I want pretty specifc things from mobile news - a particualr sports result or confirmation on the latest situation in one particular news story, not just what the newest news is everywhere.
If you’re a self-confessed news junkie, then newest news everywhere might be good enough. I think as a news provider, clearly this is one of the BBC’s responsibilities - providing the newest reliable news everywhere, but equallyimportant is for us to provide users ways of finding precisely the news they want within the whole river.
26 August, 2006 at 2:52 am
Right. There are times when you want to get everything from the BBC as it happens, but there’s other times when you want to focus in on particular aspects, or even different news sources relatively simultaneously. That’s when a dedicated application for reading RSS on your phone will really come in handy.
This River concept will be great for a lot of people and will offer a compelling alternative to the carriers portals. But more serious news junkies need something more, which is why we ( http://www.freerangeinc.com ) amoung others have developed fast, easy services that run on your phone and keep you always in the know.