There's a feature in all my rivers that makes it possible to RT a post, directly from the browser to your linkblogging tool.

Here's an example of one of the rivers.

It works with Radio2, and probably nothing else. But any other linkblogger could support it by accepting three parameters. They are: link, title, description.

They came straight from the RSS item.

The first time the user clicks a RT, a dialog asks for the domain name of their linkblogger. It stores it in a cookie, so the user never has to enter it again.

If you have a blogging tool you can support this, probably in a few minutes (and you might already support it if you have a bookmarklet, in which case please let me know).

 2/3/2012; 6:49:54 PM.   .

John Battelle is right.

Google defined the web that we like, and the web we like defined Google.

Having Google break the contract is not just bad for Google, it's bad for the web.

Two take-aways from this:

1. We should be more careful about who we get in bed with next time.

2. We probably should help Google survive, but only to the extent that they support the open web that we love.

Another comment.

On Twitter, Om Malik says that he's following me by using a search engine I wrote about here. And while I did write about it, I don't use it. And I won't unless we can work something out with them that guarantees that they will not take us down the same path Google did. I don't see the point of endorsing a successor to Google, if it just takes us down the same path again.

I use Bing on my iPad, and still use Google search on my desktop. Google for some reason decided that I need a special mobile version of their search engine on the iPad. That's crazy. It's got a full size screen. All they did was add a lot of whitespace. It's like building a car for the tropics with an industrial strength heating system and no air conditioning. Hello. If anything you'd want to reduce the whitespace on a smaller screen. But the brilliance of the iPad that software designers generally refuse to recognize, is that it has a no-compromise web browser (except for the still-irritating omission of Flash). Find other problems to solve. This one doesn't need solving.

So Bing, while it comes from a company even more evil than Google (although their evil is older and they are more humbled), is a better iPad search engine, so it's a no-brainer for me to use it over Google, there.

I've yet to find something that works well enough to replace Google on the desktop.

 2/3/2012; 10:23:17 AM.   .

As you may know, I resigned from Facebook a few months ago. I don't miss it one bit. And while I get a good dose of tech news from Twitter, it isn't enough. So I'm an at-least-every-hour TechMeme reader, even though I admit that it isn't really tech news. It's an addiction. So hat's off to Gabe Rivera for creating something I can't live without. But I want more! More! More!!

Then the other day I was looking at the TechMeme leaderboard, and saw that it lists the RSS feeds for most of the top sites. So I pulled them info into an OPML file, and created a river out of it using my River2 software, and let it run overnight to see what it would look like after some stories had come in.

No surprise -- it's pretty fantastic.

I know you all love tech news, so I wanted to share.

http://tech.newsriver.org/

PS: I sent Gabe an email yesterday with a pointer yesterday asking if it would be possible to jointly provide this as a service on techmeme.com. He's probably busy creating new "meme" sites -- but the offer remains open. I'd love to see this as river.techmeme.com or something like that. I think everyone who wants to be blasted with tech news should know about it.

PPS: John Battelle posted an excellent item yesterday asking what our vision is for the future of the web. I wanted to point out that all of these sites are totally on the web. So it ain't dead yet. And they all have feeds too. Just thought I'd mention that.

 2/3/2012; 9:24:46 AM.   .