Saturday, May 11, 2013; 7:16:00 PM Eastern
We need a curator for the Apple river
I did a house-cleaning on my river server on May 9. At that time some of the rivers stopped updating. Mostly the ones that no longer have tabs in the user interface because either I personally didn't have enough interest in the subject and not many other people were reading them. I didn't feel like paying for machine resources if only one or two people were reading the flow, or if there were only one or two new items a week. - One of the rivers that I turned off is the Apple river. I use a Mac, several in fact. And I have an iPad and an iPod. I am a long-time Apple shareholder. I am an Apple user, but I am not a dedicated member of the Apple community like some people I respect are. For example, Brent Simmons, Marco Arment, John Gruber, Daniel Jalkut or Michael Gartenberg. I see a tremendous value in the river, if only someone rooted in the community would take an interest. It's also a potential money-maker, imho.
- It's really time for communities to spread out and become more inclusive. With a well-curated river, the Mac community can explore more niches, and grow in some interesting ways, perhaps.
- So I offer to keep running the river...
- 1. If someone with a site with serious flow offers to display the river on their site, linked to from their home page.
- 2. It can be rendered in their template.
- 3. I will provide support on the technical process for getting the river to display well in another site. It involves using jQuery, something I'm not an expert in. But I got it to work here, so I presume we can get it working anywhere. If we need help I know where to ask for it. ;-)
- 4. The curator has to have the ability to edit an OPML subscription list, and make it available at a public HTTP address. Fargo, my outliner, does this very nicely, in conjunction with Dropbox. But you can use any tool you like.
- 5. The person doing the curating and the person doing the display can be different people, if you like.
- 6. Curating here means choosing feeds, not stories. We're looking for good sources of Mac news and opinion. But it's up to those sources to decide what goes in the river. It's just an RSS aggregator on the back-end.
- 7. All I want in return is a link from the page back to a page that shows people how to set up their own rivers, which I will write. It won't be hype-ish. I may ask for a little money for the software.
- I think the Apple river is a great place to start. Now I'm looking for one of the leaders in the Mac blogging world to step up and work with me on this. I may not be a Mac insider these days, but I go back to the beginning. I was onstage at the Mac rollout in 1984. I had an ad in the first issue of MacWorld. My product won the top Eddy in 1986. I used to go to WWDC back when it was in San Jose. I even spoke at WWDC one year. Ask Guy Kawasaki. ;-)
- Let's do this. I think it'll turn out to be an important step in the growth of the Mac blogosphere.