River of what?

I'm finding myself utterly, completely baffled over the spreading hype over Dave Winer's "River of news" reinterpretation of web sites. Doc Searles chimes in with a claim that "The river metaphor makes me look at the supply side of blogging from a whole new perspective." Dave himself, of course, is piling up the links to show that his approach is great.

But what does it actually appear to amount to? A method of converting an RSS feed to a static HTML page, shorn of its graphical elements.

Huh?

That's been around for about as long as there have been mobile devices and RSS. NewsGator's Mobile edition does it perfectly well. AvantGo sure did it.

So what's the big idea? I really don't see that there is one.

Comments

[Marc Orchant]

Got to agree Ian. I've been using NewsGator Mobile on my Treo for years and, after a quick look at this "innovation", shrugged my shoulders and went back to what I had been doing.

[Harold J. Johnson]

I don't know if Dave's on to something or not. Perhaps it is us who are just beginning to take notice of a concept he has been trying to make us realize for years. Whatever the case, I'm listening, because the man knows a thing or two plenty of us don't.

Radio Userland, for example, was something I didn't take to when I first encountered it. It seemed, to me, to be an application that was trying to automate the process of publishing websites -- and at the time, I thought the existing field of apps did the job well enough. I didn't understand the concept of blog-style presentation and whatnot.

It was years later that I understood what a blog was and began blogging myself. Then there was RSS...I didn't get that at all, at first. It took me awhile to understand how that could be useful. Call me slow.

Anyway, River of News may already exist, but perhaps it doesn't exist in the particular way Dave sees it. I'd listen to Dave ideas on the concept; he's right about a few things, you know, and we may just learn a thing or two.

[eric vp]

Winer invents everything two years after it was invented, ignores every previous thinker in the space that came before him, and then pitches a fit when nobody credits him for the innovation that he didn't come up with. Lather, rinse, repeat. It got boring a long time ago.

[John C. Welch]

Half the time, you agree with Winer just to get him to shut up.