This video, uploaded by CommuniGate, demonstrates Pronto!, their take on a unified communications dashboard.

The application pulls multiple forms of rich media and communication streams into a single dashboard. 

The desktops of many office workers these days often contains all of these communications forms already; they’re just not combined into a single, slick interface or administrated by centralized controls.  Given the risk that any organization, much less enterprise, takes in  allowing employees to install multiple third party applications for IM, VoIP, email, RSS, videoconferencing and web-based widgets for anything and everything else, it’s perhaps not surprising that vendors are stepping in to offer some control to sysadmins.

Dave Winer, generally considered the father of RSS, has been playing with different ways of organizing, aggregating and displaying feeds for years. OPML was a meaningful contribution (and, for once, a less controversial one) to the syndication world, allowing users to share, import and export lists of feeds, all using free tools at opmlmanager.com.

Recently, with the launch of the iPhone, an RSS hack that Winer created two years ago has been getting much more attention. Essentially, he’s optimized all of the content that a news site makes available through RSS so that it’s ideal for viewing on a mobile device, removing formatting, images (read: advertising) and all other content extraneous to the simple - and potent - combination of headline, link and summary.

For Dave’s definition of a “river of news,” refer to ReallySimpleSyndication.org, where he uses a “conveyor belt sushi” metaphor to explain the concept further.

Mmm. Sushi.

[Photo credit: Biohabit.org)

To use the newsriver, just point your browser, mobile or otherwise, to bbcriver.com for the BBC or nytimesriver.com for the New York Times. To see how it works, view this video of a BlackBerry user browsing a newsriver:

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Critics of the technique and technology point out that Avantgo and other clipping services have provided similar functions to early adopters using wireless Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs years ago. That being said, the explosion of smartphones like the BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile devices and now the iPhone has made quick-loading, mobile optimized news content much more compelling than the graphically-clogged homepages of many providers. Of course, the iPhone’s ability to browse the “full Internet” makes it quite possible, even pleasant, to surf through the different major newspaper and online media sites, but if you’re stuck on the EDGE network as you browse, it’s quite possible that a newsriver may be preferable.

I’m not sure whether Dave deserves credit for something entirely new. I do know that what he’s created makes it easier for me to access the news on the go, and for that I thank him. I’m not alone in that. A-list bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, Scoble and Dave Winer himself have all held up newsrivers as something revolutionary. Steve Rubel, over at MicroPersuasion, recently pointed out that Megite, which aggregates blog posts like TechMeme, now provides a newsriver.

The point that Dave makes in the post that reintroduced the concept of the river - and defends it against critics - is much the same as the one I just made above. While it’s been possible to do this sort of thing on a PDA or BlackBerry for some time, no one has made it as easy as simply pointing your mobile browser to a URL.

Now, in the wake of losing my MDA on a fishing trip last weekend (RIP), my next challenge to decide which mobile device I’ll be using to paddle down the newsriver.

Democracy Player is a free, open source IPTV platform. That may sound a bit vanilla, but Wired Magazine called it “the future of Net video.” Though the vlogosphere may still be in its infancy, the explosion of Internet video over the past two years has made it challenging for even the savviest netizens to keep abreast of new feeds and shows.

Using Democracy, a user can search within YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and others video aggregators. Democracy also works as a BitTorrent client, so users can search, download and watch torrents from within the same interface. The application plays most video formats, including Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI and XVID.
In fact, the Democracy platform’s engineers state that they have created a new approach to building a cross-platform application using open source technologies like Mozilla, XUL Runner, VLC and Python. The player runs on OS X, Windows XP/2000, Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian platforms.

The code for the Democracy platform is released under the GPL by the Participatory Culture Foundation , a 501c3 non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Using the fluid GUI, you can subscribe to more than 1000 video RSS feeds using a built-in channel guide. Popular vlogs like Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja and Ze Frank sit next to lesser-known vloggers, geeky screencasts, MSM netcasts, independent warvloggers and YouTube auteurs. While both Google Reader and of course iTunes can be configured quite easily to subcribe to video Web feeds, Democracy has a number of alluring features.

For instance, the Democracy player supports full screen playback, including HD support for those lucky enough to have a PC hooked up to a HD screen, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. GetDemocracy.com, where Democracy is available for free download, has been translated into more than 18.

Tired of clicking from one metafilter to the next? Thomas Marban’s PopURLs.com displays the most popular links on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Fark, Slashdot, Wired, NewsVine, Metafilter and many others, all on one page, with direct links to the stories. Federated Media calls it a “dashboard for the hive mind,” a statement we’re inclined to agree with entirely. Constantly updated headlines are displayed on a minimalist black background. You can simply rollover a story to get a summary to pop up, which makes browsing that much easier. There are also feeds for the most tagged photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, iFilm and MetaCafe.

Memeorandum.com offers the reader a window into the online world of news, focusing primarily on U.S. politics and current affairs. Memeorandum auto-generates a news summary every 5 minutes, drawing on experts, pundits, insiders, outsiders, media professionals, amateur and professional bloggers. For those who want to focus in on technology-specific news and commentary, TechMeme, in the words of its creater, Gabe Rivera, “surfaces relevant links” and aggregates them in the same way, in real-time. For many tech bloggers, getting onto the front page of TechMeme has become a highly-desirable goal because of the influential readership of “A-list” bloggers.