Implementing Checkbox News

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Yesterday's piece got the most positive and enthusiastic response of any technology I've proposed in the 10-plus years I've been blogging. I love it when an idea takes root like that. I think it's a measure of how fed up we all are with what passes for news on television. We live in a complex world, and many of us have minds and are educated, and want to understand what's going on. TV is not a bad way to do it, but the medium needs an overhaul in the age of the Internet, the same as print news does. Our attention has mostly been focused on print, probably because we haven't felt we can do much about TV. But as yesterday's mockup shows, we're really not very far from turning TV news upside down much the same way RSS turned written news over. 

Two things are needed: 1. The news has to be unbundled. And 2. We need more metadata. And both of these things are easy, and easily within reach given the current economics of TV news. They have the technical means to do the unbundling, many programs already are doing it (examples: 60 Minutes, On The Media). And then we need to know what categories each news piece belongs to. My guess is that the various news organizations already do this.  

Then once #1 and #2 are in place, just turn your news flow into a frequently updated podcast feed, and we can do the rest, building a variety of clients from Apple TV to the Windows Media Player, running on iPods and cell phones. All of it powered by the enormously simple idea of checkboxes.