Update: Over a month ago, I visited Dave Winer’s Berkeley, Calif. home. We went for a walk that knocked the wind out of me, but during course of our conversation, Dave mentioned that he was working on something new. After nearly 45 minutes of rigorous walking, we returned to his house and he showed me an early version of his new application, FlickrFan.

One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That’s because I’m doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.

It is a simple application — download and install it on your Mac, and using RSS it pulls down images from Flickr and displays them on your screen. It can be a Mac Mini attached to a giant LCD screen or simply your iMac. Doesn’t matter! What matters is that images become almost like a constantly changing channel. Dave showed me his personal channel where photographs from professional news photographers were mixed with baby pictures, photos of vacations long forgotten and friends we have forgotten to call for a long time.

This is a highly personal use of RSS, just like Dave envisioned it long time ago. Our readers are pointing out that there are similar offerings for Windows platform, Slickr in particular. I wasn’t aware of that application, and glad to hear about it. It is understandable that some might be underwhelmed, but to me it is not the application, but the concept that is more exciting.

As broadband becomes faster, who is to say that we can’t randomly pull videos (that some day will be better quality than today) that interest us from YouTube and automatically display them on our screens. What FlickrFan shows that with ample broadband, open platform (PC or a Mac or a Linux device) and RSS (or some such subscription mechanism), we can create real simple convergence.

Dave Winer, whom I have dubbed “The Constant Tinkerer,” has come up with yet another way to consume information in a simple and easily navigable manner. Well known for his work on RSS and OPML, he is now shifting his attention to finding new ways to consume news from large information sources such as the New York Times — in a style that is common to blogs.

Blogs almost always display the latest posts at the top, making it easy to get a quick bite of the latest information, and is one of the reasons they have gained in popularity. Using that framework, he has come up with an outline view of news.

A flat completely chronologic view of news probably isn’t enough. And earlier this month at a meeting in NY, two engineers at the NY Times set me off in a new direction, with a very simple bit of advice…[T]hey had applied a taxonomy to their news flow, and this opened the door to what I would like to show you today — an outline view of the news.

Winer likes to call his new experiment a “river,” but I prefer to call it real simple navigation. Using The New York Times’ taxonomy, he has come up with an example that allows you to easily find the latest news from the Times’ vast media machine. I think it is a format that should be adopted by other media companies — it is simple, and more importantly it translates into easy discovery of what’s new and hot. It helps you find related information rather easily, too.

It can also be easily adapted to mobile devices and other non-PC devices, without making major changes to their internal content management systems. Now all that the news organizations have to do is figure out how to make money off this new news view.