Wow.
I didn’t even know what FriendFeed was before I discovered BNO. According to its Web site, BNO News is a “new international news agency targeting breaking and developing stories to a global audience.” Michael van Poppel, a 19-year-old who lives in the Netherlands, created BNO. To learn more about the service, van Poppel and how it came about, read here: van Poppel first began with copy of bin Laden tape
Anyways, FriendFeed is a hybrid of Facebook’s Live Feed and Twitter, which are basically the same thing, however, on Friend Feed, you can say that you “like” something like on Facebook. (While Facebook is making so many asinine changes, why not add a “do not like” or “absolutely hate” or “I just vomited in my mouth when I read your status” option?) Anywho, BNO is basically what most people do anyways, scan the headlines to understand what’s happening and read enough to get the gist of the story. It’s microwaved news. It’s the Toaster Streudel of New York Times and the icing is FriendFeed.Of course, you can also get your BNO News via Twitter as well. BNO has 1,361,841 followers on Twitter, as of right now at 5:12 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2009. CNN only has 595,730 Twitter followers, though CNN Breaking News has over 2 million.
The fact that the news is reported in real-time is a plus. The lack of what I think is appropriate attribution is, where’s the do-not-like button?
Including a BNO News iPhone app (charging $1.99 to download and a monthly subscription fee of 99 cents)was a good strategy because the iPhone is so incredibly handy. Plus, I would assume (I know, I know) that a large proportion of the audience of BNO News would be avid iPhone users.
Besides following BNO News on FriendFeed or Twitter, users can also receive e-mail alerts.
Hopefully, people will use BNO as a starting point because apparently BNO is as “breaking” as news comes. So, readers can go there first to know what’s happening in the world around them and head to other news outlets to get the rest of the story.
“Journalista” has a Che Guevara ring to it. I’d say it’s journalism with a higher social mission, revolutionary in spirit, speaking to power and furiously independent. But I don’t think “journalistas” can expect to (or want to) get rich…