When I preach the benefits of River of News, I always get flack about how it's not the only way to read news. I know that. Of course.  

Let's spell it out.  

The kind of flow almost everyone agrees is suited to River of News are feeds from news orgs like Reuters, the BBC and Guardian, AP, the Washington Post. They're constantly publishing links to stories, many of them different views of the same events. And they repeat. Join all those feeds and that forms the river. 

And then there are my friends, Doc Searls, NakedJen, Fred Wilson. People whose every post I want to at least see, if not read. My mother has a blog. When I talk to her on the phone she always asks if I've read her latest posts. I never want to have to say: "No Mom, I must have missed it in my River of News." And then there's Paul Krugman and Simon Johnson, two people I've never met but have enormous respect for. I want to read everything they write.  

However, what they have in common is that they update infrequently, and it may be they should just be in a "slow river," together, instead of a mailbox-like approach to feeds as implemented by Google Reader and NetNewsWire. In fact, that's how I make sure I see all the updates for these feeds, by flowing them through a special Twitter account called FriendsOfDave. Until the OAuthcalypse it was implemented as an adjunct to River2, my desktop aggregator. Then I switched to using TwitterFeed, and it works great.  

So you may want two or more rivers, that update at different rates. 

BTW, this is part of a continuing series on rebooting RSS. There will be more, if there's interest. And when you comment, please try to stay on-topic. If you have something to add to this post, information or a new perspective that's non-obvious, please post a comment. Thanks.