It turns any OPML file (in this case, a file that lists the source URLs of RSS feeds) into an animated screen ticker that runs along any edge of your computer’s desktop. Imagine a stock ticker, but with news headlines from the web sources you’ve designated. At any point, you can click on the headline and ticker stops and reveals the summary excerpt of a post.

In other words, it’s like an RSS reader that is set up in a River of News mode, but in this case, the headlines are actually flowing.

On second thought, for those who attempt to describe RSS as a “push” technology, ala ““PointCast,” this will be your best example, so far.

On third thought, it turns every thing you follow online into something like a giant animated twitter feed.

It’s cool, but don’t download it. It’s crack, I tell you. It’s crack.

If you’ve ever visited the website of the place I work, you know that.

So, when I point to this New York Times piece about the books written by Barack Obama, “A Career Forged by Telling His Story,” it’s not a political statement, but it is an endorsement of the idea that great stories well told are the key to any cause worth joining, any product or service worth buying or any candidate worth electing.

Quote:

“Senator Obama understands as well as any politician the power of a well-told story. He has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story — a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books that have made him a mega-best-selling, two-time Grammy-winning millionaire front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at age 46. According to his publisher, there are more than three million copies of his books in print — and two more on the way.

More, later.

Blodget does not explicitly agree with the prediction, indeed, he points out some holes in the theory. He doesn’t fully repudiate it, however.

I’m clearly not a financial analyst and so any disagreements I may have with Mahaney’s predictions have nothing to do with market-share numbers. I have no idea about the revenues or bottom-line impact of future Kindle developments. However, since some of his analysis is based on his personal experience with the device, I feel I can at least weigh in on that front.

First, let me say I use the Kindle frequently. Not quite daily, but several times a week. My review of the Kindle from last December is still accurate. I haven’t really been surprised by anything about it during the past five months. It’s still a clunky, poorly designed piece of hardware with a ridiculous interface. Yet the EVDO (digital cellular)-powered feature that allows one to instantly purchase books from Amazon for less than $10 is near magic. That price-point for books and the instant download are what make the device work for me — and, apparently, the Citi analyst, also.

However, I stand by my earlier prediction — and this is where I find a flaw in Mahaney’s analysis: Apple won’t stand still and let Amazon have this market all to itself. As I’ve written about ad-naseum, a slightly larger iPod Touch linked to eBooks distributed via the iTunes store would match and raise the game with Amazon. At that point, Amazon would be competing with the iTunes distribution channel, but with Amazon hardware that looks and feels like it was designed in Soviet-era Russia.

Also, with Apple in the game, its eBook format would be readable via the Mac or iPhone, as well. The Kindle format is locked into a Kindle device.

As I wrote last November, I’ll continue to use my Kindle until Apple comes out with something like this (even if it’s not in the next couple of weeks):

After being among the first to rant about what a horrible interviewer Sarah Lacy was at SXSW, I backed off when the crowd piled on and even ordered her book, became her fan on Facebook and suggested the controversy was a great book-marketing ploy. In her acknowledgements, obviously written before SXSW, she does take a swat at the bloggers who, “reacted violently to her (BusinessWeek cover story that led to the book deal) that it only gave me more press and legitimacy.” (The controversy in the story was the suggestion that Digg was worth $200 million.)

Yesterday, I received the book from Amazon.com and quickly scanned the first couple of chapters — enough to convince me she’s a much better writer than on-stage interviewer. On the page, she doesn’t interject herself into the narrative.

Frankly, I’m typically not a fan of biographies of still active business executives — or in the case of her book, biographical vingettes strung together in a book-length “trend story.” Over the years, I’ve discovered that books about dead people are more instructive than books about the living. Call me old fashioned — or morbid.

For example, I tried really hard to like the recent book about Steve Jobs by Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain. And while I found it nice that he eschewed the typical recounting of Jobs’ darker side, it is still a bit flat. I was especially disappointed by what must have been a publisher’s request that he put bullet-point “lessons from Steve” at the end of each chapter.

Lesson from Inside Steve’s Brain: If you want to throw cold water on a biography, end each chapter in ready-for-Power Point bullet points. Bullet points in a biography are about as elegant as big buttons on an MP3 player.

Sidenote: I really love the way that Amazon.com “Search Inside” logo juxtaposes with the book cover in that screen grab above.

In other news, McDonalds has announced it will stop selling Quarter Pounders and Nike is exiting all lines of business related to sports.

Who dreams this stuff up? This sounds like an idea straight from Jack Donaghy, vice president of east coast television and microwave oven programming?

“Not only do small (Long Tail) publishers montetize their content at 3-5 times the rate of the larger publishers in PubMatic’s survey, but they’re improving in the current environment while the big publisher decline.

This is a fact of life in business-to-business-media, where the business model has long been focused on “free” distribution of content to decision-makers in specialized fields. The “cost per thousand” (CPM) model of advertising sales does not exist as a metric in this long-tail of the media world. Of course, if an advertiser selling a $100,000 piece of equipment can reach 90% of the decision makers in a market of 5,000 specifying engineers, then, hell-yeah, the publisher of that content should be able to monetize it at hundreds of times the rate of, say, a newsweekly.

The lesson here: Online, if you want to monetize content, the number of eyeballs seeing your content is less important than who those eyeballs belong to. And the more helpful that content is in assisting real people make important and valuable decisions, the more “monetizable” it will be.