Thursday, September 29, 2005

Back to basics of reading a river of news Jon Udell's article, A channel changer for the Bloglines river of news, may have a title that only a dedicated Really Simple Syndication (RSS) user could love... but it made me nostalgic for the first time I ever saw news scrolling up a computer screen. That was more than 25 years ago, the day The Hartford Courant unplugged my typewriter and replaced it with an Atex editing terminal. That event changed my life, leading me to a software industry job, some magazine writing, and what feels like about 20 years of grad school to keep up with communication technology. Early-Atex nostalgia: The keyboard was huge, with a handy row of keys labelled "Save/Get" for what we now call "cut & paste," another bunch of function keys on the side, and a screen with bright letters glowing against a dark background. At first, we called it a "CRT," for "cathode ray tube," not a "monitor." Ten years later I worked for a magazine editor who still called our computers "tubes." (They were Macintoshes.) Even more than Atex's Save/Gets, I immediately fell in love with two things: Using the delete key (which ended my 10 years of thypxxxx typing rows of x's to "erase" my typsxxx mistakes), and Reading the newswires, which up until then were only available as dot-matrix printouts unspooling from the teletype machines that rattled away in the glass room behind the copydesk. Most of the wire service stories the average reporter saw came as ripped-off lengths of teletype paper an editor might leave on your desk with "AP got this story, why didn't you?" scrawled on top. Instead, Atex put all of the Courant's newswires right in front of me, as reading material. I could scroll through headlines from the Associated Press, UPI, the New York Times wire, the LA Times wire, plus a dozen other services and syndicates, sort them by time received, and scan the newest first -- something Dave Winer and Jon Udell refer to as the "river of news." There was more: With one keystroke, I could expand the list, replacing the headlines with the first paragraph of each story. I think I could set that scrolling list to show however much of each story I wanted. (With no Atex manual handy, I'm doing this from memory.) I'd like to be able to do that today, but most of the news RSS feeds don't go beyond the headline and summary. However, lots of blogs, including this one, feed their full contents, so an expand/contract feature might be useful in the next generation of news aggregators. (The aggregator would still download the full contents of each blog post, but the user would decide how much of each one should scroll by as part of that broad and deep stream of text.) So... back in 1980 I was already spoiled by having not only a "river of news," but a river that could be instantly sampled at various depths. When I had opened story to read the whole thing, I could split the screen, pushing that story into a left column, scroll through more headlines on the right, then pick one for a side-by-side comparison. Later, as an editor, I could even copy and paste paragraphs from one column to the other -- to create a "combined wires" story. (When I bought my first "personal computer" a few years later, I was disappointed to discover that most programs had no built-in "split screen" function.) Back to the "river of news": What Jon's article points out is that a combination of RSS feeds and the right "news aggregator" program can recreate something like that 1978 Atex scrolling column of news summaries, topping the list with a story from the Times, the BBC, CNN or the Knoxville News Sentinel, or Dave's Scripting News -- the most recently updated feed you subscribe to. Jon explains how to accomplish that with Bloglines.com, a free online feed reader, shifting it from its folders-and-panes, e-mail-like display to a single column of news. He mentions Dave's program, Radio Userland, which includes a one-column news aggregator, as well as a full blog-publishing system. (The one I'm using right now, in fact.) The only other news aggregator I've seen that sticks to the "river of news" format hasn't been updated in a year or two. However, it still works, and it's free (or "donationware"). Don't mind its odd name: "Amphetadesk." I recently discovered that the program is so small and self-contained that I can store it on a keychain flash drive and demonstrate it on any computer in any classroom I'm teaching in. In fact, I can store both the Macintosh and Windows versions. (I have to test this idea some more. As they say, "your mileage may vary.") There are plenty of RSS aggregators out there that follow the folders-and-panes e-mail layout, but the older one-column style may be a better tool for news junkies who like the "latest stories first" idea, rather than the source-by-source approach -- which, come to think of it, is a lot like that old glass-walled room full of separate teletypes, one for each wire service. I tried Bloglines last year, but I haven't used it in a while, and it looks like it will take me another visit to follow Jon's instructions for its "river of news" mode. They involve something called a "doLoadAll function" in an "n Updated Feeds link," neither of which jumped out of the screen at me on the quick visit that preceded this wave of Atex nostalgia. Maybe this weekend, I'll get back to Jon's Radio for another try. 4:49:00 PM

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