River of News to River of Feeds

Dave Winer is hitting the memetracker headlines again with lots of commentary on the new mobile version of his River of News feed aggregation model. While I like that the River of News philosophy frees us from the aggregation hell of unread news I think it doesn't go far enough in looking towards the future, a future of feeds everywhere. I probably said it best in February -

The River of News model is one that makes absolute sense while we're stuck in a subscription mindset. If our software insists on us making long term commitments to individual data streams then the best choice is to route those tributaries to the river. But as we slowly replace the notion of feed subscriptions with the concept of Feed Grazing it will make more sense to think about a River of Feeds. In an RSS everywhere world its not the individual news items which will flow by us but the actual streams themselves. It could be like sailing down the main artery of the Amazon basin. A meta river you might call it. Your boat can catch the eddies at the mouth of the individual tributaries as it moves along. It can can pass a mouth quickly or more slowly depending on how much information it wants to sample.

I wrote that months before I joined the Advisory Boards of Grazr Corp. but it was an early hint of where my thinking was focused. Here's a draft version of a River of Feeds view for Boards.ie. The Arts, Biz and Comp branches are complete.