Every morning I get up and load the main feed at Placeblogger.com, and every day it looks more and more to me like a realtime wire service with a sense of humor and cat pictures.
Have I mentioned I love the cat pictures?
But today I'm at the world's great temple of Real JournalismTM. Yes! The New York Times! That's because today is the day that the Times is holding TimesOPEN, its first conference aimed at software developers.
I've seen a lot of things that make me think, but the one thing that really caught my attention was a review of the Times Newswire API. This much anticipated API "is something many people think we must already have -- but don't yet," said a speaker who had his badge turned the wrong way (Sigh.). That is: it's a news API.
The Newswire API will be a stream of consciousness for all content across New York Times.com.
I have a hard time putting it into words, but there's something sublime about seeing entries from placeblogs across the globe; it's like overhearing the planet.
And now, with the Newswire API, we'll be able to "overhear" the Times in a way that neither the front page nor the site's published RSS feeds allows.
But what if the Times started making their APIs -- currently read-only -- into read/write APIs?
What if you could get a combined feed of the Times, other newspapers, blogs?
Now that -- that would be pretty cool.
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