Dave Winer’s notion of “Rivers Of News” gets picked-up in The Guardian – a good overall summary of a powerful concept.

“As the name suggests, it’s a simple idea. Each news item arrives in plain text and consists of a date and time, a headline, and usually one sentence…

New items arrive when they are posted, and old ones are automatically deleted to make room. You can dip into the river whenever you like, and click on any headline to get the full story from the original site…

… As Winer commented on his blog: “Predictable backlash from people who say that reading news on a BlackBerry is nothing new, they’ve been doing it for years. I’m sure they have, and people were listening to MP3s on Macs and PCs before podcasting, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a turning point for audio on the Internet.”

Dave is right – and this concept is different in its inherent simplicity and speed. Rivers are reverse chronologies, like weblogs. Current offerings attempt to transport the desktop to the device, are typically slowed by ads and other crap, and are an amalgamation of links that force you to keep on soaking-up bandwidth and minutes. “Rivers Of News” work. Current approaches don’t.

Also, take a look at the NTTimes new mobile site.