A lot of new stuff coming together here

Something occurred to me yesterday and I am very excited about it - and then today I saw What will a linkblog look like in 2015? by Dave Winer. I am not the right person to fit the need expressed in that post, but a quote from the post really stuck with me.

There's going to be a lot of new stuff coming together here.

I’ve followed Dave’s work and writing for almost twenty years. I believe strongly in open standards and protocols, and I like a web that is future proof. One of his best ideas, in my opinion, is what he has always called a “river of news.” I love getting my news that way and I’ve tried a lot of different tools over the years and none have been exactly what I wanted. Even Dave’s own river tools were not exactly what I wanted or they didn’t quite work for me for one reason or another. About a year ago, I had this idea for an open platform that was inspired by Dave’s writing on all of these topics. It’s something I think the web needs, and though I’m no marketing genius ( nor do I care to be ), I think I even know how to promote it for mass-market appeal. About the same time, someone contacted me to work on a project that had elements of a river, which gave me a nice opportunity to work on something that would get both projects moving. Over the past year I’ve been experimenting with most of the tools Dave has been working on, but because the river tool has never been quite what I wanted I was mostly ignoring it. Until yesterday. I decided to give it a spin and the experience this time was much better. I had a head start because I decided to run it on the same server on which I run Fargo Publisher, but I feel like even without that head start, it would have been a very simple thing to get up and running smoothly. And that’s when it hit me how nicely all of these tools fit together. I think I’m a pretty smart guy, and I’ve known all along that my idea is inspired by Dave’s work, so I guess I am not sure why it didn’t occur to me until yesterday that not only has he provided the inspiration, but he has built the tools I need to build the thing.