Inspired by the thinking behind Dave Winer’s concept of “river of news,” it is a reflection of the changing nature of news in our time-constrained life. Many of our readers and sources have lamented that they have to read the full story when the real information can be wrapped up in two lines. At the same time, I was finding that my growing network on Twitter was feeding me more interesting stories to read than I could find myself.

So why not combine the two and come up with a live microblog-based newswire? Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been using headline and news alerts forever. Except now we can do this on the Internet, using an open source platform (WordPress) and some clever hackery. (More details, along with notes about current and future features, below the fold.)

A Quick Rundown of Features:

1. It will feature 15 to 30 short posts every day. Each post will be less than 250 characters. Headlines are restricted to 115 characters.
2. You can receive the alerts by subscribing to RSS or on Twitter. Or, just sign up for once-a-day e-mail newsletter.
3. We’ll post topical headlines from GigaOM network and partner sites.
4. GigaOM Network editors and writers will file quick news bits relevant to their beats, including breaking stories and hot tips we pick up while on the go.
5. We can use Twitter to file news “from the field” using our Blackberries and/or iPhones. We have worked out a way to interface Twitter with our CMS, WordPress. (Related post, Meet GigaLogue.)

Open To Other Blogs, Too

We are going to use our network to build up this new service, but if you want to participate, it is as simple as getting in touch with us. We are in the process of working with some other blogs who will be feeding their news headlines and short excerpts into our system.

Over a period of time, we are going to open this to more folks and eventually have correspondents from around the world send in their “alerts” to us. But that is in the future. For now we just to make sure it works smoothly.

Other Planned Features:

1. Photos directly from our cell phones or digital camera when we are on the go.
2. On-the-go video clips to this service as well, again mostly from mobile phones or handhelds.
3. IPhone/Mobile Browser version of the site.
4. Special widget that you can embed on your blog.
5. Social networking widgets that will allow you to enjoy this in Facebook or on one of the many social networks and a desktop application based on Adobe Air. (If you want to help us on this, get in touch with me.)
6. More undisclosed features…Stay tuned.

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One of the great things about Facebook is its newsfeed, a feature that was first introduced to me by Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30Boxes, who first rolled out a newsfeed in his calendaring application.

During the course of working on GigaOM Daily, our experimental micro newsblog, we ended up developing GigaLogue, which can help turn your WordPress blog into a newsfeed very similar to the Facebook newsfeed (or any other newsfeed). We wanted to develop GigaOM Daily using Prologue, but in the end we came up with our own solution. A few points:

• Inspired by Prologue, we are releasing a template and plug-in set called GigaLogue.
• It will include the Twitter, RSS and email aggregation features.
• It will enable users to instantly create groups or communities around a variety of different content sources (notes from Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from Vodpod — basically anything that could go in a feed or an email).
• It will be released under a GPL license next week on dev.gigaom.com

Essentially we are using some of the more common and open technologies — nothing more important than RSS. Since this is being released in open source, we are hoping developers will write plug-ins that can add more social features into this theme. Others can develop plug-ins for sharing documents or calendaring information. Of course, there are thousands of WP plug-ins that can be retrofitted for this theme and take this in directions I can’t even imagine.

As I said at WordCamp, we are not a technology company. Instead we are a media startup that is using technology to figure out the future of our business, wherever it might head up. In the course of doing so, our tech team came up with GigaLogue. Big thanks to Chancey Mathews and Kyle Johnson, the quiet geniuses inside our little company. Thanks to them, expect more such experimental stuff from us soon!

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