I’m not sure who coined the term River of News [RoN] — Dave Winer, maybe? — but Lora Heiny was curious about creating a River of News stream of the various Tablet PC blogs out there:

Technically, I’m not sure how to do this. I know how to get them listed in blocks, but I’d like them sorted by time and not by blog. I should ask Layne. Layne? Loren? Anyone? Maybe TDavid knows…?

Yes, I do know how to do this. And I just whipped up some code as a proof of concept to illustrate this functionality (pictured above).

A RoN blended feed is not as simple as it might seem though, because basically one has to create and run or acquire their own RSS aggregator (either locally or server side) that caches and stores the feeds, then sort all the feeds by DESCending date/time across all feeds. As new blog posts are made there also needs to be a system of making sure the new posts are added and not re-added to the local cache, or you’d end up with duplicate entries. These questions and more need to be addressed in the design of a server side program to produce a RoN feed.

At first I thought about doing this without a database but as I pondered it more it seemed less complex to dump the feeds into a database, sync up at sane intervals with the various RSS feeds and then produce the RoN stream.

This RoN stream still needs an interface for adding new Tablet PC blogs though. This will display the most recent 50 posts (since the last RSS sync), sorted by date for the following blogs:

- all of the tabletpcblogs.com
- Lora’s MSN Spaces blog
- Loren’s Incremental Blogger blog,
- Robert Heiny’s Tablet PC Education blog and
- the MakeYouGoHmm Tablet PC category blog entries

I realize that this list is woefully incomplete, but again it’s merely a proof of concept at this point. Lora is currrently at TechEd so I’m not sure when she’ll actually see any of this.

I could create a private login for approving new Tablet PC blogs so that a moderator could make sure no spam or adult blogs sneak through. Also a private (or public, I guess) RSS feed could be generated so that the data could be implemented on any page/site anywhere, but we can talk about that later if this seems like something you really want to do.

Lora - you might want to drop me a line privately to discuss the best way to handle adding additional approved Tablet PC blogs and integrating with the tabletpcblogs.com site if you so desire. There probably isn’t a huge list of third party Tablet PC blogs so maybe it isn’t even necessary to have a completely automated system for adding new blogs? That we can discuss privately I suppose.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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