Jamie Little is a NewsRiver fan. There is compromise though: set up five NewsRivers on different topics. Have a Personal one, a Techy one, a Political one and so on. Or perhaps have a way to tell NewsRiver what stories are important and which aren't (a couple of boxes to enter regular expressions would do it, and provide lots of opportunities for power users to have fun). 

Matthew Haughey is absolutely right when it comes to encryption: the UI and experience sucks, and it is absolutely essential that it isn't. PGP in Gmail would be absoultely killer, for instance. 

Donovan Watts is saying, simply, that Radio UserLand is dying. 

Sam Harris responds to the frankly ridiculous criticisms to his previous article. 

The Department for Homeland Security are getting some bashing for their distinctly "furry" themed preparedness-for-kids campaign. I think it's pretty cute and has the advantage that all the time they spend drawing furry art, they aren't feeling people up in airports and generally causing havoc. Oh, wait, that's the TSA...  

Invite Alternatives 

So, CoComment is out. I want to join the beta.

But they have an invite code on it. I hate these things. Why bother?

If it's just for marketing (which the CoComment folks say it isn't), then fine.

But if the service is as good as it sounds, then you don't need to market it. We will market for them.

Instead, here's a better solution. Let people sign up, but have them trickle in. They can fill in the join form, and confirm their email. They are then added to the 'wait' list. Let a few hundred in, test away.

Then when you're happy, let a load more in. Repeat this process until you're ready to go.

Then, and this is important: remove the damn beta labels.

Reading Lists List 

Here's an idea. Make an OPML file containing links to Reading Lists.

You then take that OPML file and process it. The processor takes the Reading Lists that are pointed to and works out what are the x most popular feeds and plonks out an ordered OPML file of the top x feeds. You can then subscribe to that feed.

What does this produce? Your very own Technorati Top 100, manually editable to include whatever reading lists you want to include.

It's also based on reading, not linking. Of course, there'd be problems to overcome: if I list a feed, that counts as a vote. If Scoble lists a feed, that counts as a vote. If I am subscribed to Scoble's Reading List, does that feed have two votes? That sounds like a preference option to me.

Similarly, what would be cool is if software existed which would poll Reading List(s) for the RSS, and find the most linked to things in the RSS feeds. This could be a bit like Feed Butler - although better because it's not centralised.