Dave Winer recently launched NewsJunk, an RSS-backed aggregator of political news, with Nicco Mele. Mele, the former webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign, says they’ve been developing it for months:
I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.
During the 2000 cycle, I worked as the webmaster and technical director of the Shadow Conventions. That’s actually where I first met Dave, through Edit This Page.com. Then during the 2004 cycle, I worked as the webmaster for Howard Dean. This cycle (2008) after a false start, I’m excited to be working on NewsJunk.
What’s the over/under on how long it takes before this collaboration crashes and burns? As Jason Calacanis will tell any human or puppet who asks, Winer can’t work with people. He’s never mastered the principle “you have to be a friend to have a friend.” Mele, who destroyed his rep among former Deaniacs by backing McCain, is exhibiting some weird judgment here too.
As Mele ponders how much effort to put into their joint venture, perhaps he should consider the significance of the following three facts:
- Winer owns the domain
- Winer runs the application on his own server at 70.85.234.142
- Winer claims all rights to the project: “© 2008 Scripting News, Inc. NewsJunk is a trademark of Scripting News, Inc.”
#3 is interesting. Makes me wonder if Winer convinced Mele to actually just invest in Scripting News generally, rather than this specific project.
And how do you work on an RSS aggregator (running on Dave’s software almost guaranteed) for months? It sure wasn’t the design. This looks like one of Dave’s early morning scripting sessions, not a serious project.
I keep thinking this is a joke, that dave will come out and say “newsjunk was a smoke screen. Here’s what I’ve really been working on!”
But it looks like this is it, and after rambling on about it for weeks at ever posssible chance it’s just reaching 400 followers on twitter now.
Comical and a little sad.
Just another Winer project that everyone treats as some kind of startup when really its something a decent programmer could put out in less than an hour. He didn’t even bother to make a new template for the thing.
It looks just like Scripting News which itself is just a freakin html table against a white background.