Drowning in the Rivers of News ?

Lately Dave Winer has been writing about "Rivers of News" where Dave is seeing a "River" of RSS feeds of information flowing past him. Dave apparently recently got a blackberry and has found the data heirarchy hard to navigate (e.g. on BBC , NYTimes, Digg etc). He found he liked the side-scroll button which enables him to quickly move up and down an email or webpage, so using his OPML editor Dave developed a number of “mobile” rivers which he could view on his Blackberry and unlike most RSS aggregators the river is not structured into folders.

Dave's view, as I understand it, is that our minds are great pattern finding engines, give us the whole river (it used to be called a data stream in the Old Days, inflation eh) of data and we will find what we want more efficiently than any other system we know.

Thats all fine in theory, but as any human computer interface person will tell you (never mind all those employees facing 200+ emails a day already), we do tend to drown after a certain volume of data washes over us.

There is a sense of deja vu in all this, anyone remember the pre-web internet (Web 0.0?) and those streams of alt.net and later eGroup emails…a waterfall of data, never mind a river! Thats why we invented threading, hated people who didn’t keep up heading title discipline and started using folders.

In other words we soon started breaking the river down into streams, (or channels if you are a TV media head).

It is really not that different in RSS...arrives in a slightly more convenient way but the "river of news" still flows into my Cesspool of Unread Stuff.

We do a lot of work in the broadcasting / cable space, and they know that the EPG (electronic Programme Guide) is critical. The value in multichannel media has always been as much in the EPG as in the content.

I suspect we are going to have to learn that in Web 2.0 too....fast. So, lets think about what an EPG might look like in Web 2.0. There are a few problems.

- Firstly, the content is mainly user-producer defined - so metadata discipline is still pretty darn poor, which makes pro-active searching for relevant stuff fairly hard.

- Secondly, social network rating/recommendation is all very well but it takes time, and as we saw at Digg recently it can be perverted by the vocal (textal?) minority

- Thirdly, RSS EPGs will increasingly be expected to interwork on mobiles, TVs and probably Nintendo DS's in the near future.

So, a solution has to:

(i) Ensure that some form of discipline exists in the folksonomy, plus probably have a user preset capability to decide on priorities, and also some form of intelligent search of incoming.

(ii) dynamically configure itself to the rating/recommendation status of the social network filter

(iii) be simple enough to use like a TV EPG is - all these small devices are pretty hard to use in anyu compex interaction.