Scripting News: Progress on FlickrRivr

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Progress on FlickrRivr

I've made a lot of progress in the last 24 hours on the packaging of FlickrRivr.

A picture named ohRudyIsntThisAFunPlace.jpg

To summarize, it's a desktop application that subscribes to one or more feeds from Flickr, and deposits them in a folder of your choosing. Then you can configure iTunes to synch from that folder to AppleTV, so you can see pictures of your Flickr friends automatically updated on the screen of your TV. You can of course also configure your Mac's screen saver to run off this folder, for the same effect on your laptop or desktop computer.

I've got the configuration part working now, before I had the aggregator working and it's been running on my home entertainment center for over a year. People find it fascinating. Me too.

Now I've hit some stumbling blocks, no deal-stoppers, but I thought maybe I could open this up so that people who read the site can help search for what I'm hoping to find.

Yahoo has lots of RSS feeds, and they even have feeds with news photos. Very cool, except the photos are low resolution, too low to be good for this application. Seems a shame, because in between pictures of Irina and Valerie, Scoble and Justin, and everyone's cats and grandparents, it would also be great to mix in pictures of Gonzalez and Imus, Sharpton and McCain. A bit of Edwards and Clinton wouldn't hurt. Obama and Blitzer. Cheney. Ahmadinajad. The Dear Leader. The Great Wall of China. Tony Soprano.

And the feeds don't have to be from Yahoo. If you know of other sources of news photos in RSS, I can use more examples, more stuff to preconfigure FlickrRivr. If bandwidth is an issue, I don't mind mirroring the feeds and photos on my server. I don't think there will be so many users as to make bandwidth a serious issue.

Anyway, if you have any ideas, please let me know.

PS: I know this is realllly low-tech. All of the good stuff is. But I'd be willing to bet this is as big as blogging or podcasting. A major application for our networks. It's that compelling.

PPS: The guy on the left in the cowboy hat is my maternal grandfather, Rudy Kiesler. Here's the full picture.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:41 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Mar May