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Friday, September 15, 2006
 

When I told RockyTopBrigadier Johnny Dobbins that his PDA-compatible blog aggregator looked like a Tennessee River of News, he took the idea literally and registered the name. It didn't take me many visits (and typos) to suggest shortening it to TNron.com. (Having a name that rhymes with a certain defunct energy company may make it more memorable.)

I also asked whether the Django aggregator toolkit feedjack could be used to flow together rivers of Tennessee bloggers and professional news sites... more of the "Pro/Am" citizen journalism idea I keep mentioning... Johnny (rapidly becoming "dJohnny") gave a combined-sources "pro" aggregator a try, so now http://rockytopbrigade.org/mobile/ is the "Am" part and http://tnron.com is for "Pro" prose.

Background: The "river of news" nickname for last-in-first-out aggregators comes from Dave Winer, who recently put together text-only rivers of stories from the New York Times, CNet and BBC newsfeeds. As I mentioned last month's Dave's extra trick is that he links the rivers' summaries to the "Printable" versions of the stories -- text-only versions that wrap nicely into the reading space of his Blackberry or my Palm TX.

Inspiration: But I still do most of my news reading on a 15-inch laptop screen. That, and last month's nostalgia about reading parallel columns of news with Atex, inspired me to open three browser windows side-by-side to look at the Tennessee, Times and BBC rivers... which got me thinking about the controversial old Web technology called "frames"... So I put a Three Rivers of News page together to demonstrate to my class.

Controversy: On that page I included a discussion of just why frames were controversial. If you try the page, notice that the Times uses a technological solution to people "appropriating" stories by using frames: My page frames Dave's copy of the Times headline and summary feed, but if you click on a headline link, the story itself breaks out of the frame. Not only that, it bypasses the text-only version Dave linked to, and loads the original story -- complete with advertising, Times logos, and section menus.

Thoughts:
  • Frame-busting seems like a much better solution than sending a lawyer to my office...
  • By sending "my" readers to the original story, the Times is exposing them to the ads and offers that pay the salaries of its reporters and editors, which is certainly a good thing... Some of my students want to draw New York Times paychecks someday.
  • Questions: What about the readers following those other "rivers" to the text-only stories?
    • How can they contribute to the good work the reporters are doing?
    • Are they just scanning headlines, or are they comfortable reading full stories on a small screen?
    • Will they go to the full ad-supported site when they get to the office?
    • Would they tolerate having text ads in the text-only stories?
    • Would they pay for a subscription to NYTimesriver.com? (Pay the Times, that is... not Dave. But let the Times pay Dave for recognizing that sometimes less is more... more of what I want than the Times own mobile feed, for instance)
    • Would they prefer special versions of the stories--shorter than the originals, but longer than the usual RSS summaries? (More "rewrite desk" jobs for journalism grads, if there's money to pay them?)
News: Speaking of The New York Times, I've just bookmarked a neat blog page where its Web folks point out their latest ideas: http://firstlook.nytimes.com

Then while browsing around the site, I also stumbled on this intriguing address for a small-screen-size "site map," complete with some free archives going back to 1981: http://spiderbites.nytimes.com

The bare bones look of those pages makes me think I've slipped into something through the back door! Hmm. I don't remember browsing the Web when this was news. I guess the spiderbites pages are individual stories referred to by the Times Topics pages introduced earlier this year. Something similar also appears to be a feature of other Times-owned sites... see http://spiderbites.boston.com

Bottom line: Back to my main train of thought... If cool little text-only River of News aggregators are going to strip out both the advertising and the links to advertising-bearing pages at http://nytimes.com, how do readers of those "rivers" help pay the salaries of the reporters, writers, editors and publishers who make it all possible?

Comments appreciated.

7:49:14 PM    comment []


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