Consuming the News through Feeds, Rivers and Trees

Prior to Friendfeed, one of the easiest ways to follow a byzantine configuration of blogs and websites was to build a list of feeds in a newsreader like Bloglines or Google Reader.

Friendfeed introduced the “river of news” concept. Some call it lifestreaming. OK, but doesn't life happen offline?

Semantics aside, the river of news makes it easier to scroll through blog posts as they're published. Friendfeed works great for browsing the latest. And while it’s not a pass through, it makes it tougher for me to keep up with an individual blogs' posts.  So from an archival standpoint, a feed reader has always been my mainstay.

Get on the Newsmap
When I saw Newsmap for the first time; I was impressed as it allows you to see a lot of news at once. But unlike news sites like Drudge Report for example, you can immediately discern which stories are getting the most coverage. I’d love to have the browsing functionality of Newsmap for something like Bloglines.

When I first read about Our Signal, I realized that my wish list might not be too unrealistic. According to the site,

Oursignal.com looks at currently popular items on the top social news sites (i.e. Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Hacker News) and mashes it all together in an interactive treemap, very similar to the well-known Google Newsmap. The idea is to allow users to get a rapid overview of what the latest breaking headlines are at the frontline of the intermatubes. The bigger the rectangle, the more relative votes a story has. The warmer the color, the quicker the story is on the rise. Cooler colors denote negative velocity.”

Treemaps, Rivers or Feed Readers?
Consuming the news is getting tougher to do. Sites like Newser are helping with big headlines, but a treemap/feed reader combo would make consuming the news a lot easier.

As news continues to flow, it's key to develop a smart approach to staying informed. What's your best tip for staying on top of the news?

Comments

[Brian Hayashi]

I think the opportunity today is to provide new ways to visualize information. Consider the gamecasts for sports sites: they essentially take text-based information (say, "CIN QB Carson Palmer hands off to CIN RB Cedric Benson for 17 yards from the CIN 40 yard line") and send that to its gamecasting application, which helps you visualize what's happening. Obviously there's a lot of precedent (and a lot of money) but I think apps like that foreshadow the future of media, even Twitter.

There is a tremendous delay in the original invention of these apps and their "commercialization". If you look at the page for NewsMap's inventor, much of this stuff was done 5 years ago.
http://marumushi.com/projects/newsmap

It's too bad there's little to no market for RSS, as shown by Dick Costolo's experience: after founding Feedburner, he went on to create a VC fund for RSS-related companies. When that didn't pan out, he recently became Twitter's COO. (And, if you read the leaked notes, Twitter isn't exactly a big fan of RSS. But that's another story.)

[Kevin Dugan]

Brian - Great points here. I do think sports and weather offer up some interesting ways to help move visualization technology forward into the mainstream. For weather I look at sites like one of my local tv station's weather page: http://www.wlwt.com/weather/grid.html which even allows you to customize the dashboard.

On RSS, I'm surprised by this also...up to a point. I think more people are using RSS as the plumbing to customize news feeds on MyYahoo and iGoogle than even the users realize. And to me, using it as plumbing like Yahoo! Pipes, is where it excels best.

Thanks again.

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