The 24-minute news cycle 

I woke up early this morning, about 4AM.

Went downstairs, turned on the radio to KQED-FM. They're interviewing Newt Gingrich, talking about the 24-hour news cycle, a major innovation they're adjusting to in DC.

I went upstairs with my coffee, did a few hours work, came downstairs for a break, turned on the radio, exactly the same bit is playing. Gingrich talking about the 24-hour news cycle.

Then I thought back to a moment, on Wednesday, when Twitter was carrying the instant news of Steve Jobs's leave of absence. At the exact same moment, came news of the death of Ricardo Montalban. I should have taken a screen shot, because there were constant tweets from people saying Did you hear about Steve Jobs. Did you hear about Ricardo Montalban.

I thought at the time, forget about the 24-hour news cycle, we have a new concept -- a news cycle measured in minutes. What made me think of it was in the midst of all this I saw a lonely tweet from a company I know announcing a contest for developers. I thought "too bad, no one's going to notice that."

This is what we're all working on -- have been for a couple of years -- how to make sense of news that flashes by at such a rapid rate that it pushes the envelope on human ability to notice things.

We may be lining up to eat at soup kitchens in 2009, but we'll have the fastest news cycle ever to keep us informed.

Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.

The interactive living room of 2009 

There's an interesting piece on TechCrunch today that's in part about using laptops while watching TV, something a lot of people do, and more will certainly do in the future.

This is the system I like. I've explained how it works over on Flickr. Click on the pic to go there.

FriendsOfDave in XML 

First, a common request -- people have asked for an OPML subscription list for the FriendsOfDave Twitter/Identi.ca/FriendFeed feed. Done.

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDave.opml

But while I was doing this I had a thought that it's a micro-nano version of weblogs.com before it became a ping-server. If you recall, it used to poll for changes among a small set of weblogs. This method became unworkable because there were eventually too many blogs to poll. But FriendsOfDave is, by design, always going to be a small number of blogs. So I thought what the heck, let's have it generate a changes.xml file of its own.

http://static.opml.org/twitterRiver/friendsOfDaveChanges.xml

An old friend!

Now, why this is interesting? It's a key feature of the "real time web" that so many of us are thinking about. If every feed had someone watching out for them, along with 100 or so other blogs, then if a subscriber wanted to know if you changed, it would just have to watch the changes file. Of course if only one person they followed was represented in that file, no economy would be achieved, but if you group similar sites, ones that are likely to be followed by the same people, then you do get the economy.

Somehow the feed has to tell followers where their collection point is. Way back in time we used a category element at the top level of the feed to create this linkage. As far as I know no one build features on this, but they could have.

Will anything become of it this time around? Probably not, but it's still kind of interesting, if only for the nostalgic value.

This Land is Your Land 

For me this was the most emotional moment of yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial: Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen leading a chorus of This Land is Your Land.

All those people singing, and Pete Seeger after all these years -- he can still lead a crowd in song.