The site likely gets little traffic, but what it does get is good for the NY Times. Their mobile pages have ads on them.

As an experiment I just went to mobile.nytimes.com with my user agent set to iPhone (FireFox’s UserAgentSwitcher is great for stuff like this) and their homepage is essentially a much more nicely styled version of the River. And up to date, the River hasn’t been updated for 14 hours. So yea, this is all a moot point. The NY Times already does what Dave does, but they do it better.

“their business wouldn’t be hurt beyond getting less front page traffic.”

Do you think anyone else could register a domain like:

nytimesriver.com

And then use it to create a summary/outline of NY Times Mobile Formatted content and not get a call from their attorneys?

Of course, Dave, explains:

This site is an experiment to see how we can make news work for people who use mobile web browsers.

He always uses “we” when he needs to sell something: like a site that re-purposes content. He keeps hoping that the NY Times will link to his innovative use of the mobile web and RSS.

Fair enough… since he gave them RSS. He gave us all RSS. He should be able to take some advantage.

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html

I just added the business feed to a reader and the headlines are the same (including descriptions). Actually his site is behind a little bit. The difference being he’s linking to the mobile site and not the main site. The difference in the URLs is minimal and easily automated–change “www” to “mobile” and the ending “.html” to “.xml”.

Yet another one of his “apps” that is nothing more than a tiny script that could be handled a lot more efficiently in something other than Frontier.

“The NY Times site is just an RSS feed shown online”

What is the NY Times feed that Dave is using… I think they offer the feed to mobile phone users that sign up and Dave has re-purposed that feed thus disintermediating the NY Time readers from their mobile service. That’s what I think is a conflict. The NY Times probably is building an audience and then trying to do deals with Mobile providers… sometime that might be doomed to fail but Dave’s News River just makes their business model fail faster.

Anyway, if the NY Times RSS composite “mobile” feed is public and not a subscription then I’m full of shit… but ready to clean up.

http://bloganon.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/scripting/

I tried copying the text here but there are too many characters that can’t get past the wordpress text entry processing.

You might notice the “sed” stage to fix the triple slashes in the URL.

I still think Dave is violating the terms of his AP photo license by making these images available an RSS feed.

He gets away with violations of content that make his business interests untenable.

I don’t think his NY Times River of News is kosher either… but they are probably looking the other way. I noticed the NY Times announced a Mobile deal with AT&T so Dave’s hack will probably get taken down since he’s probably signed up for the service and hacked re-publishing the text.

You can’t base a sustainable business on re-purposing commercially protected content. So, Dave’s “businesses” are not sustainable, IMHO.

Al of Dave’s efforts at this point are intended to get commericial interests to open their content for re-purposing: NetFlix, Yahoo, etc are all targets for his influence.

Usage: python /path/to/ap.py /path/to/images/

Obviously most useful when automated by cron. The first time will take a while (downloading 200+MB) but then after that it only downloads the new ones so it takes a minute or so. On my laptop it’s 1-3% CPU when in use, I wish I could say that about the OPML Editor!

Since the images are pretty big and I only want the latest in my screen saver folder, I avoided the shell script manner and did a bit extra in Python. It syncs a local folder with the feed (deleting the ones no longer present) and then reverses the ordering so that the last image is alphabetically first which makes it show up first in the screen saver. It also has an option to show new images on the desktop (as a SS) as they come in.

Let me know if you want it. Besides the desktop screen saver part it should be cross platform.