Is River Of News an advance for readers or not?

Doc Searles has a long and interesting post about what Dave Winer’s “River of News” concept is really all about. He makes the point that a lot of those saying “so what?” about it - myself included - are missing the point.

My point is that Dave isn’t just coming at this as a technologist. He’s coming at this as a publisher. Specifically, he’s proposing River of News as a new format for publishing. Or a new approach to it. His message with River of News isn’t just for geeks like us. It’s for the NYTimes and BBCs of the world, as well as for bloggers whose output is frequent and texty and newsy enough to work, as Paul Kedrosky says, like a newswire. But unlike the old newswires that went from AP and UPI to newsrooms at newspapers and broadcasters (or to professionals at workstations at brokerage houses), River of News goes directly from writer to reader. In other words, its a new, phone-friendly approach to publishing.

There are a couple of points in answer to this. The first is that the notion of creating a site explicitly for mobile users isn’t new. The BBC, for one, already does it - a service that I use pretty much on a daily basis.

But that isn’t the only thing about River of News. The other aspect of it is that it treats all forms of content in the same way: with the time of posting as the only heirarchy. There’s no attempt to define something as “top story” or sectionalise the content beyond the raw RSS feed. Of course, this has technically been done before too - NewsGator lets you convert any feed or set of feeds into a Mobile-friendly format - but the point that both Doc and I believe Dave are making is that this “River of News” approach is the best method of working on small-screen devices, as it intrinsically divorces the content from that Doc refers to as “stuff”.

As Doc puts it:

Mobile feeds and systems for looking at them on phones may not be new. But getting publishing in alignment with the needs of Web users with cell phones is new. That’s why River of News is a business hack. It’s not a social hack, because the users are already there. The River of News idea calls attention to an opportunity opening up for everybody who produces news. Not just for those who consume it.

The thing is that the reverse-chronological approach isn’t the best way to consume news for most people, because it lacks one of the main things that readers expect from publications: context. The only editorialising is time-based: the latest story is the one on the top. Unfortunately, that doesn’t actually tell you what is and is not “news”, because news means more than simply what is new.

Take a look at Dave’s BBCRiver.com site, and compare it to the main BBC News Mobile site. As I write, the top story on the official BBC site is “13 Obese Adults by 2010″ - the same as the top story on the main BBC page. On BBCRiver, this is the sixth story down - top story is “Wembley Casino plans axed”.

Why does this matter? Because people go to a news site to find out what’s happening, and part of finding out what’s happening is seeing instantly what the most important thing occurring at that moment is. Chronological reverse order tells you what the latest news is - but not the most important.

With mobile access, the need to show what the most important story is is doubly important, because access is likely to be sporadic. I spend five minutes checking the news on the bus. I spend ten minutes reading while getting coffee. I don’t have the news constantly trickling in, and I don’t want to have to wade through all the latest minor stories in order to find the major ones.

The River of News approach works when content is fairly slow, when there are (at most) five-ten stories per day. But for an organisation like the BBC, which produces hundreds of stories and story updates across a huge range of subjects, it is at best confusing at at worse unusable as a coherent news source. Far from being phone-friendly as Doc claims, it’s phone-unfriendly - you don’t want to have to scroll down five screens of local news stories and sport in order to find out that a plane’s been blown up. The comparison with an AP feed that Doc makes is quite a good one: 80% of newswire stories get dumped by editors unless it’s a slow news day or they have specialised interest. Because River of News has no one editing it, no one saying “this is the top story” it fails as a coherent news source.

tags: riverofnews, docsearles, davewiner

 

Apple and Creative settle

File under “least surprising legal development of the day”. Apple and Creative have settled their big patent dispute - and it looks like a pretty clear win for Creative. As noted in Apple’s press release:

Apple will pay Creative $100 million for a paid-up license to use Creative’s recently awarded patent in all Apple products. Apple can recoup a portion of its payment if Creative is successful in licensing this patent to others. 

Ouch. However, Steve Jobs does manage to get in what sounds like a slightly bitter comment:

“Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

You have to admire him. Only Jobs would make it sounds like Apple was somehow granting a poor neighbour some chump change.

The sting in the tail? Creative is going to be working on accessories for the iPod:

In addition, the companies announced that Creative has joined Apple’s “Made for iPod” program and will be announcing their own iPod® accessory products later this year.

I’d love to know what that is. But with Microsoft effectively pulling the rug from underneath Creative with Zune and what’s likely to be the slow death of the Plays For Sure system that underlies Creative’s own players, the company will desperately be casting around for alternative revenue streams. So perhaps, while Apple has lost the legal battle, Creative has finally admitted that Jobs and Co have won the war.

 

Joe Wilcox on Writely

I’ve been using Writely, the rather slick online word processor, since before it was acquired by Google. Joe Wilcox signed up for the service over the weekend, and he’s impressed:

Make no mistake, Writely offers all the basics and easily can meet the “good enough” threshold for many consumers or small businesses. Writely fully responds like a desktop application, even though all writing and formatting takes place in a Web browser. There is a right-click context menu for the insertion of formatting or photos and copy, cut and paste. The functions are well organized in the menu bar, and they are task oriented. There also is a “Collaborate” function and another to “Blog.” Not surprisingly, Google’s blog service is on the list, but not Microsoft’s.

You should, in fact, be able to blog from Writely to Live Spaces - both support the MetaWeblog API. But it’s no surprise that Google is making it a whole lot easier to blog to Blogger.

Interestingly, Joe compares Writely to Windows Live Writer - a nice, non-obvious comparison.

tags: joewilcox, blogger, livewriter, writely, google

 

Alas, poor classic

As Chris Adamson notes on O’Reilly’s Mac DevCenter, the release of the Mac Pro means that Classic, the system that allowed Mac OS X to run old Mac OS 9 software, no longer runs on any new Macs. Chris asks the question of whether this actually matters:

Of the really important apps I used in Classic, most have been Carbonized (Graphic Converter, Quicken, Mariner Write, etc.), so even if they’re not Universal Binaries, Rosetta can do an on-the-fly recompile into x86 and they run. And a few others got Carbonized, but I moved on (goodbye, Internet Explorer, hello Safari and later Shiira).

There are, however, a couple of applications that need Classic and that have yet to find an adequate replacement: most notably, Outlook for Mac. While Entourage makes a great stab at working with Exchange Server, it still lacks a couple of the features of Outlook - most notably, support for shared calendars. This could still be an issue in the future.

 

The best way to run Windows on your Intel Mac?

Pete Wright raves about Parallels Workstation, the product that lets you run a full virtual Windows install on your Mac desktop:

My first impressions: WOW!

This thing is fast. It’s faster in a virtual machine than my aging Dell laptop at the office, and it feels faster than my Motion LE 1600 tablet… If you have an Intel based Mac, forget Apples BootCamp - install Parallel’s Workstation instead and run Windows on your Mac’s terms, not the other way around.

 

Microsoft - the real winner from Boot Camp

Cringely:

Just realize with me that the only company that truly benefits from Boot Camp is Microsoft, because they’ll get to sell a retail copy of Windows XP for every copy of Boot Camp and retail XP makes Microsoft about three times as much money as the OEM version.

Microsoft LOVES Boot Camp and I am sure they’ll say that shortly. After all, Boot Camp sells more copies of Windows without threatening more sophisticated products like Microsoft’s own Virtual PC.

One reason why Microsoft isn’t surprised by Boot Camp is because Microsoft has been working with Apple to make sure that Windows Vista runs well on IntelMacs. Apple will support Vista dual boot, though I don’t know if they will become a Vista OEM, but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t if it will help sales.

If Boot Camp is part of an OEM deal worked out with Microsoft, that suggests that Microsoft will take the high ground by offering a version of Virtual PC for IntelMacs. To be perfectly honest here, I KNOW about the Vista compatibility through Microsoft (not Apple) sources, but I am only guessing about the Virtual PC part.

 

 

The Smartest Comment on the Whole Amazon Vs Microsoft Blogging Shizzle

Bynkii:

Even worse, Shel talks about “The Wisdom of Crowds”. Shel, I’ll tell you now, the only consistent characteristic of a large group of humans is stupidity, perhaps followed closely by being easy to manipulate. Pet Rocks anyone?

I’ve been following the threads on how Robert Scoble and Shel Israel got a bit of a kicking from Werner Vogels when they attempted to tell the folks at Amazon that they should be blogging with some amusement. I’m not really a fan of the whole “everyone needs to blog” approach to corporate blogging. While I think that blogging has its place, it’s not a panacea and if you aren’t doing it, you’re probably not missing out too much.

One of Robert’s quotes in his post stuck out:

Blogging doubled sales at Stormhoek winery, according to its CEO

I think this sentence, on its own, shows why, Werner was right to give Shel and Robert a rough ride and demand some real figures. The actual first line of the story that Robert links to is this:

“South African producer Stormhoek has doubled sales of its wine with a campaign directed at the blogging community.”

Can you see the difference? Stormhoek didn’t double its sales through blogging: it increased them by marketing to bloggers. That’s a very, very different claim. The only actual indication of how many bottles that were sold via blogging is the 100 bottles sent out via Hugh - of 100,000 sold. How many of those 100 bottles were turned into further sales? How many people who bought Stormhoek did so because they’d heard of it via a blog? And how much more significant was the fact that Sainsburys, Asda, Oddbins, Majestic, Waitrose and Somerfield - all major UK wine sellers - started stocking the brand?

That’s what Werner means by a lack of hard figures. Now Amazon has a LOT of hard figures about its customers. It knows everything you’ve bought, and how many things (and what) you’ve bought after a recommendation. It knows who your friends are, because they bought you things from your wishlist. It knows what you sold through its marketplace, it knows if and what complaints you made. THOSE are hard facts, and from them Amazon can tell a much greater range of things about its customers than any amount of blogs would.

 

The New Narcissicm

Nicholas Carr: The new narcissism

As I myself have thought about the watery philosophy and the powerful technology that dovetail so neatly in Web 2.0, I’ve become convinced that we’re building a machine that will, to great and general applause, destroy culture. Keen gets close to the heart of the matter: “If you democratise media, then you end up democratising talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratisation, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’” In the end we’re left with nothing more than “the flat noise of opinion - Socrates’s nightmare.”

Yes, I fear it’s so. Beware of those who come with money and influence and pretty-sounding abstractions and who are utterly unaware that what they so joyfully seek to impose on the world is their own reckless banality.

I think there’s something to what Nicholas is saying, but the problem isn’t the “democratisation” of media. The trend at the moment is for the blogging world to be a kind of feed-pool for professional media – look at how people like Marc Orchant have crossed over into the mainstream. At the end of the day, talent will out. Opinions that don’t stand up to the rigour of reason will wither, those that work won’t.

In fact, I’d argue that it’s often been the case that mainstream media has represented “the flat noise of opinion”, because they haven’t been involved in conversation or debate. Newspapers have been one-way streets, whose opinions haven’t been subject to any debate outside the confines of the walls of the newsroom. They have been impervious to challenge, except for the challenge of the market.

Where there is a problem with the neo-hippies is in their insistence that opinion itself  – the voice of the people – is intrinsically of value. Opinion without argument is valueless: the tyranny of relativism.

 

Computer makers - stop this please!

After Kim’s post about the insane software crap that comes with peripherals, it’s worth reminding ourself that computer makers are at least as stupid. Omar Shahine recounts his story in “my sony vaio”:

I LOVE this laptop for many reasons. It’s sexy, small (and I mean small), light, has the thinnest LCD I have ever seen. I HATE this laptop for the reasons I hate all Sony laptops. They took over 6 GB of my 60GB hard drive for the “recovery partition” I understand if this machine had no CD drive, but it has one, and the cost to burn a DVD with the OS and restore software can’t be more than a buck. The kind of company that skimps on a buck is questionable. And of course, the minute I booted the laptop I knew I had to flatten it cause it was rat infested with OEM crapware.

So, off to create restore disks I go. Sony included software to burn the recovery partition to 7 CDs. That took an hour. Then I installed Windows, and proceeded to install about 15 “utilities” and “drivers” to get the laptop to function. Some of the utilities didn’t install properly and I could not get the power management software to install. To give sony credit, they make the process of downloading the bits easy compared to other guys. But installing is a nightmare of orchestrated instructions that resulted in failure (and I’m not a dumb guy).

My own experience is similar. Despite costing as much as a new PowerBook, my Vaio didn’t come with install discs – you have to make your own (thankfully it has a DVD burner so at least it’s easier than Omar’s experience). There’s a huge slew of software on it that I don’t want, and that, in some cases – SonicStage, I’m looking at you – I can’t even work out how to uninstall.

In fact, I’m off now to have another go. Let’s see if we can get rid of this crippleware crap.

 

How fast was that Mac again?

Lovely as the new Intel-based Macs are (and tempted as I am by the iMac), those performance figures – 2–5x the speed of current G5’s – always looked a little suspicious. In “The Mac performance shell game” Paul Thurrott links to the following from Infoworld:

Apple used multiprocessor benchmarks to skew the performance advantage that its Intel-based machines enjoy compared to single-core PowerPC G4 and G5. Apple used the industry-standard SPEC suite components SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000, but here’s the catch: Apple used SPECint_rate2000 and SPECfp_rate2000. Both tests spawn multiple parallel benchmark processes and are specifically intended for comparing multiprocessor systems. Single CPU, or single-core machines do positively lousy on SPEC*_rate2000 tests. That’s predictable and universally understood. Add a second CPU or a second core and, as you would expect, SPEC*_rate2000 performance on any multiprocessor-optimized test skyrockets compared to a single-processor box.

Apple uses SPEC*_rate2000 tests as a foundation for claims that Intel-based Macs outperform PowerPC G4 and G5 by a factor of 2 to 5. Well, yeah. A dual-core anything outperforms a single-core anything else by a factor of 2 to 5 in benchmark tests that make use of multiple threads or processes, tests crafted specifically for the purpose of stressing SMP-based systems. It’s murky marketing, and the sad part is that Apple didn’t have to resort to it to make Apple’s PowerPC-to-Intel switch look like a smart one. Mac users have no choice, and users also know more or less what to expect performance-wise.

As Paul goes on to point out:

What should have tipped everyone off is that the Core Duo chip is aimed at notebook computers, not desktops. In the case of the new iMac, especially, it’s hard to understand how a notebook chip could do so well against a relatively high-end desktop chip, dual core or no. I’d be happy if the new iMac was simply as good as the iMac G5, from a performance perspective.

And, of course, that’s running Intel-native code, not PowerPC emulation done in Rosetta. Personally, I suspect that we’ll find once the first real-world benchmarks come out that it’s actually slower when running current PowerPC applications, although not by much.