|
"Blork" is Dave Winer's product that I've been helping build with a growing number of developers and users. He explains why it is called this here.
 As I was pondering writing this piece, I looked at the name as an acronym, and was surprised how easy it was to reverse it into one:
Blork is built around the notion that just about every information source on the internet has an rss feed (even twitter users), and that there is a plethora of applications and devices that understand how to read and display an rss feed.
Blork combines these two functions into one interface, allowing for a flow of feeds that I follow to be displayed, which I can RT, or add my own item. These items are typically a link to something I find interesting, along with a description of what the link is and often a short synopsis.
Sound familiar? It should, because what I just described is 'Twitter for News'. Only, as Dave explains, it doesn't have the company Twitter Inc. in the middle. This is all direct from the sources, and from me directly out to the people following my feed. This includes people who follow me on twitter. Blork has a feature that posts my feed items directly to my twitter account, so I don't lose my followers there, they still see what I'm blorking, they just risk twitter failwhales etc that could disrupt the flow to them.
My Blork experience brings me fresh news 24/7 on my terms. I have a mix of mainstream news feeds I'm following, alternative sources, tweets I care about, new CSPAN videos, Whitehouse press releases.. the list goes on and is obviously endless. (screen shot)
If I want to route a story out to my followers, I just click 'RT' next to an item and it prepares my writing area with the information pre-populated. (screen shot) The best part about this 'Twitter for News' is there's no 140 Character limit :-)
Now, here's the beauty part, besides any app or device that can follow my rss feed, Blork is designed to be a community server, I can create accounts with the click of a button. I have 80 other Blorkers on my server already. Since Blork also fully integrates OPML, I can follow feeds from an other Blork servers, and automatically get new feeds when they are created there. If there's something I'm not interested in I can unfollow of course.
Recently I did an experiment that resulted in the realization that 95% of the people I follow on twitter have no news value to me. I of course follow the relevant 5% in my Blork.
|
Yesterday I realized that I've become a new category of internet user. A Blorker.
