As a member of the EC2 for Poets society, I have been dilligently following the path of building a decentralized news eco system. At least that's my takeaway of the project.

Throughout the process I've learned how to set up a server on Amazon's webservices, create 'buckets' that work a lot like a really, really easy to set up webserver and I've been re-introduced to the OPML editor.

The beauty of what is happening here is that many great nuggets are hidden in plain sight. You just have to know where to look and follow the breadcrumbs.

After having set up a small group (<10) of producers of the No Agenda Radio Show on their own Radio2 minimal blogging system, and flowing their feeds through a dedicated river of news, I found another peice of the puzzle.

Feed Hose is a term I remember reading about somewhere back in september, at the time I wasn't sure what it meant and didn't put much time into investigating it.

When the feedhose.root tool showed up, I dilligently followed the setup instructions (if a former MTV-VJ can do it, so can you) and the result turned on a very bright lightbulb for me.

I'll draw an analogy here for explanatory purposes. The easiest example is twitter and the iPhone app I use to manage my incoming tweets.

Under the hood of this iPhone app, it talks to twitter HQ and can pull in all the tweets that are being created in near real-time. I liken it to sucking down the data from Twitter full-bore "feed hose"

Of course looking at that vast amount of data isn't very useful, so I usually just look at the tweets of people I'm following. This is another feed hose, just one that I've customized to only deliver the data that I want to see.

And then there's mentions of @adamcurry. Also represented by a tab in the iPhone app, but again, this is really just a custom feed hose that only delivers tweets in which I'm 'mentioned', wether I'm following those people or not.

I know that there is too much data being created from all the world's tweets, so clearly these feed hoses are stored at twitter which filters the appropriate information to the feed hoses I've determined.

With the feedhose.root tool, I am now my own twitter HQ. I can set up any number if feedhoses, that parse ALL of the feeds my main river aggregator is subscribed to ready to be accessed by my feedhose.root tool on the other end, anywhere in the world.

I can filter by URL and I've even had some success at parsing by keyword.

The result shows up in my personal feed hose app (the OPML editor) in near real-time and sometimes even instantaneously. The result (screenshot) is exactly like twitter!

New stories show up at the top, if they have a description you can expand them and double click on the link to open the story in a webbrowser. Sound familiar?

Now all the stories the producers think I should look at flow into my working environment in real time, and I can copy/paste them right into any outline I'm working on.

What's so great about these feed hoses that I set up and control? Well first of all there's just that. *I* control them, both server and client side.

But more exciting is that this is all based on RSS, so I can pipe all kinds of content combinations through my hoses.

I will be writing more about this as I learn more with my little test group and hack around.

For now, I just wanted to share my enthousiasm :-)

Postscript: If you want to hook into my Feed Hose, the server is located at feedhose.curry.com and the default feedhose is "linkblogs"

 2/28/2011; 3:25:36 PM.   .