dotShout! up in alpha

Well, its been a couple of weeks and dotShout! is shaping up quite well. Its officially been released in alpha.

At its onset, I simply wanted an alternative feed reader to keep track of online and new media news, but it has evolved into something a bit bigger. Presently, it has a several rss sources populating the general pool of news coverage within ‘Technology‘ which are then broken up into more refined categories:

• Apple
• Design
• Gadgets
• Industry News
• Jobs
• Linux/Unix
• Media
• Programming

If a feed is of interest, you can add it to your ‘My News’ section, or if a particular post catches your attention, you can ‘fave’ it to your bookmarks.

How I hope it will grow is by members entering their own feeds to watch. If a feed reaches a certain level of popularity, it will be flagged for consideration for the general pool. If the feeds deviate from the subject of technology, additional subdomains will be added. A few that are already being considered are:

• Politics
• Sports
• Gaming

I’d like this to remain a source of news and opinion and avoid the muddy waters that digg and reddit have gotten into (and addressed) with images and video. Also to avoid it being dominated by MSM like Techmeme or BlogRunner appear to be, most feeds are from individuals, niche publishers or blogs (Although a few choice MSM blogs may work their way in).

Please test it out and let me know what you think.