My new news page
Sunday, April 05, 2009 by Dave Winer.
I have a new publication that I produce in collaboration with the people who follow me on Twitter, and the people who follow them, etc. It's really interesting from a human standpoint and also from a tech standpoint. 
But first, here's the end result:
http://twitter.scripting.com/daveTopLinks.html
It's updated every five minutes. The list contains the last 25 links I've pushed through Twitter. How fresh they are is a function of how active I've been. Right now the oldest link was posted 30 hours ago.
They are ranked by the number of times they have been clicked on. So if they are retweeted with the link intact, the clicks on those count. If someone clicks on a link from the toplinks page, that counts too. So it's collaborative, and the ranking tells you something about what people who are in my cloud are interested in. Tech news ranks high. Not sure what other conclusions to draw (too early). A top link gets about 800 hits.
How it works -- I have a little web app behind a bookmarklet that makes it easy for me to post a link to my twitter account. Here's a screen shot. It shortens the URL with tr.im, which has an API that I call every 5 minutes to find out how many clicks each link has received. My app generates the report and saves it to Amazon S3 which is where twitter.scripting.com runs.
I think of it as a "Personal Digg." I nominate the links, everyone determines how they rank. It might just catch on. 
| Recent stories: |
"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.
Dave Winer, 53, 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 Berkeley, California.
Dave Winer 
My most recent trivia on Twitter.
