Newsrivers, Topicstreams

The inventive Dave Winer has produced two “newsrivers” for those of you on mobiles. He’s taken the news feeds from the New York Times and the BBC and republished them as HTML streams of stories, updated every ten minutes, suitable for reading on a small screen. The Times is at http://nytimesriver.com/ and the BBC at http://bbcriver.com/. Seems to me that, because of their regular updating feature, these would also please news junkies who have widgets on their start pages.

In addition, because Dave has been talking on Twitter recently about the N.Y. Times’ keywords, I discovered Times Topics. Just in case you don’t know about these, let me tell you that the Times has a set of a couple of thousand topic labels, accessible by an alphabetical listing, each of which gathers stories branded with that topic and offers an RSS feed for that topic. The feed for Laws and Legislation, for example, is here.