This is a very simple idea but it may not have occurred to people.

It’s a secret I’m sharing with 27K-plus people who follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

If you look at my tweetstream, you’ll see I push a lot of links. I don’t have millions of people following me, but the people who do follow me are the kinds of people who do three things: 1. They click on links, 2. they tend to read, and 3. they retweet.

I read news all the time in my realtime-aware RSS river. Not many people use it, but I do. And as I said earlier, I push a lot of links.

If there’s an interesting tech or political story that’s carried by two or more pubs, whose story do you think I’m going to push? Here’s the obvious answer —> The first one I see.

If I subscribe to your feed and it doesn’t support rssCloud, it’s going to hit my desk at the top of the hour along with all the other static feeds. But, if you’re like the small number of sites that have realtime feeds, like CNN, GigaOm and TechCrunch, I’m going to read your story right now.

I’ll have pushed your link, on average, a half-hour before I even see theirs.

When Mark Rizzn Hopkins says this stuff really works, he knows what he’s talking about. In absolute numbers you aren’t going to find very many people who are hooked into realtime feeds. But they’re exactly the people you need to reach.

This advantage won’t last long because eventually all the tools will automatically support this. WordPress does now, that’s how GigaOm and CNN got on board so quickly. I’ve met with a number of pubs who say the numbers aren’t big enough yet. Imho, they are looking at it all wrong.

Dave Winer
Berkeley, CA

PS: If you have a realtime news feed let me know!