Dave Winer: RSS on the desktop, 15 years later
Distilled, in a tweet, this is what it’s about to me. “One of the most patriotic things you can do is to upgrade the quality and breadth of the news you read. Invest in your personal news flow.”
Even just a few months ago, that statement would have seemed arrogant, even unhinged. But today we know that control of information flow is essential to basically everything. It will be even more so in the future.
That’s the anthem of my new product, Electric River. It’s now available for the Mac, hopefully soon on other desktop platforms. It boots up reading the feeds I set it up to read. But you can and should make it your own. I want to work on making feed discovery better next, but for right now, you can build your own news network and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make it work.
[Dave’s vision for this has been clear for very long time, but is as fresh as ever. So, if you’re reading this, and you’ve been actively seeking and sharing stories in places like Facebook, do yourself a favor and try this out. Seek the news feeds that you find important and add them in. Most of all, continue to seek the truth that lies beneath the reporting, editing, and biases.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 