Dave Winer - Are you Paying Attention?

Dave Winer just made a post that could not be more perfectly written if I had paid him large sums of money to endorse Touchstone. So... Dave, if you don't mind - I am going to quote this post of yours everywhere...

He says:

[...] Most RSS readers remind the user, all the time, how wrong he or she is. Or inadequate or lazy or behind in their work. [...]

[...] Think about it this way. Suppose you read the paper every day. What if at the top of the paper it told you how many articles from previous issues you hadn't read. Whoa. When you subscribed to the paper did you mean to imply that you would read all the articles?
Emphatically: News is not email. Unlike email, every article is not necessarily something you should read, or even look at. [...]

[...] Let the news flow by you and relax like someone sitting on the bank of a river looking for something interesting as you while away the time. That's how news works, and RSS is, emphatically, for news.

Try this one out. Imagine you're fishing, and there was some nerd on the other side of the river, shouting at you, the number of fish that went by that you didn't catch. How long before you'd want to kill the nerd?? [...]

Well Dave, I have good news for you.

Nowhere on the Touchstone interface do we count how many unread items you have. We do not have any 'mark folder as read' either.

News flows over you via a news ticker and popup alerts (or your own personalized RSS feed, or SMS etc).

In fact, we pride ourselves not by how many items we display but rather (using our clever Attention Profiling Technology) how many items we suppress because it knows the article doesn't rate based on your interests.

The only number our new build will display, in fact, is how many hours we have saved you by NOT showing you the items you wouldn't have cared about in the first place.

Because News is Not Email.

I said it ages ago, and now the man who popularized RSS agrees with me.

I think mainstream users understand the temporariness of news far better than us geeks and they will understand Touchstone far better than a full-screen, email/newsgroups type feed reader.