Rivers are still the best way to get news via the web
by Dave Winer Monday, June 6, 2016

I still get better news from my rivers than I do from either Facebook or Twitter. My technology is nowhere near as complex as theirs, because my only goal is to provide links to lots of interesting news stories. 

There's no business model attached to my rivers, that's where all the weight and complexity comes from in the algorithms of the social nets. They need to make money off the flow. I don't. I just want more better news. 

I have MLB, NBA, Guardian, Washington Post and podcasting single-page rivers. I also have a multi-tab page that combines most of these, along with my own personal river, with the feeds I personally want to follow, that don't fit in the other categories.

The newest single-page river is one focused on political news.

There's also a river panel on my blog's home page.

These are just some of the ways rivers can be used to build community.

I share my rivers with anyone who wants to read them, and quite a few people do. It's not going to generate the flow of a big platform, yet -- but it certainly could. And unlike the others, I have been updating the software openly under the MIT License, which is the most liberal. 

We know how to deploy river software. I keep beating the drum on this, expecting that one day the news industry will figure out that there's nothing hard about reading systems for news, without the tech industry business model.

In other words, there's an opportunity for the news industry to disrupt the tech industry. Not something the tech industry is going to be all that interested in you knowing about of course. So you don't see innovations in river technology on Techmeme.

Just knock on my door, news industry, any time, you'll find a friendly software developer here anxious to help you be successful.