One of the things that gets my synapses firing is the frequent unlikely juxtaposition of items in my news reader. Because I’m looking at the feeds chronologically, in a river of news style, there are collisions that set off new ideas.
Today it was the close proximity of Geoff Manaugh’s Bldgblog on China’s dust bowl (amazing and frightening photos) with The Run of Play’s musings on Jose Mourinho’s move to Inter. Both blogs have consistently excellent writing. What struck me today, however, is that both were about dreamscapes in unlikely places.
I don’t claim any great significance for this – particularly in the week when we’re finally going to get the transformative Democratic candidate I’ve been waiting for – but it’s those interesting juxtapositions that keep my mind healthy.
Incidentally, for political junkie river of news fans, Dave Winer’s latest venture is essential reading. NewsJunk doesn’t create my favored unlikely clashes, but it is a way to immerse yourself in the stream of political news and analysis.
I’ve become a true believer in River of News style reading. We built all sorts of tools to allow the creation of blended feeds like this and I’m also surprised at the odd “narratives” that sometimes arise. I guess as humans we can’t help but see patterns in chaos 🙂
Since we allow multiple reading lists and multiple rivers based on different reading lists (I’ve got several of my own with different feeds, although multiple rivers is a paid feature) and the original concept was for the republishing of these rivers as widgets, I get to play with all sorts of different combinations of feeds.
You can poke around on http://grazr.com/whatsnew and http://grazr.com/recent to find lots of “mixes”, the first being our examples and the second link having streams made by others. The “whatsnew” page’s categories are a little “Magoo” but we wanted to get the point across.
Anyway, it’s an interesting insight, one I’ve noticed too (but I thought I was just weird 🙂 ).
Oh another fun point is when there’s a hot news topic, you sometimes get these rapid fire clusters of _slightly_ different wording or different takes on the same basic news story. That can be interesting too to see a snapshot of quick impressions, like multiple facets of the same story almost simultaneously.