River5

There are 13 posts filed in River5 (this is page 2 of 2).

Want to help creating RSS reading lists for news orgs?

This morning, I saw a tweet from Dave Winer responding to a Emily Bell and Aron Pilhofer thread on making news story data available for public understanding. Dave made the following comment:

Emily, Aron — I’ve followed the other thread. Interesting. Here’s something useful that could help right away. A collection of RSS feeds from news orgs, maintained, with metadata. Something a group of j-school students, maybe even from different unis, could do. 😉

I added this to the thread:

I have a start at this, see http://andysylvester.com/files/reading_lists/…, these lists are used by River5 to power http://fullblastnews.com

Several years ago, I created lists for print media, news networks, video from news networks, and collections on other topics for a demonstration site called FullBlastNews.com. It was meant to show off River4 (at the time) and use of tabs to switch between different news rivers. Some of the navigation is having some problems now, but the rivers still run….

I am publishing my reading lists/rivers lists/RSS lists URL to help jump start this, I am not sure if Aron or Emily or Dave will take any action, but I will be following this conversation to see where it leads.

 

How can we work together on the open web and on software development

I have been in several conversations in the last week (voice and email) where the concept of “working together” in software development came up, and several threads emerged:

  • how the original developer doesn’t/shouldn’t have to do everything – others can contribute (to me, a key concept in open source)
  • how interested/engaged users can be an important force in the direction in which a software application or tool goes forward

Dave Winer has written about this many times:

I have tried to follow that second point in several ways:

I am getting ready to start working in the computer music area again after a long absence, and I am reviewing available tools to see if they fit the areas I am interested in. In that way, I am trying to practice the concepts of working together as I have outlined above.

Anyone want to work together with me? Let me know!

A cool River5 trick to update subscription lists

Frank McPherson has created a wiki page on his usage of RSS, which includes River5. One aspect of using River5 is that the default setup is to have subscription lists within the folder where the app resides. On Frank’s wiki page, he gives a tip on how to use an OPML file to refer to another OPML file on a server to update the subscription list. Neat!