Visit at the NY Times

Thursday, October 11, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Today I had a visit at the NY Times with a couple of tech guys, got a tour of the newsroom and now have a fairly good idea of what's available on the Times site these days and got some pointers of places to look for interesting possibilities. 

One of the intriguing spots was this blog... 

http://open.nytimes.com/  

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/rss2.xml  

"A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers." 

This is something new.  

"All the code that's fit to printf." 

I had noticed that the Times has some pretty rich metadata. Do a View Source on any story. Wouldn't it be cool if that data were included in their RSS 2.0 feed? The category element is designed for exactly that kind of data. And I wondered if there is a master taxonomy somewhere. I'd love to see it. 

Anyway, this is just the beginning of a conversation. Derek and Jacob have their hearts in our world, and even though the Times still feels as if it's "over there." Perhaps someday it may not feel so far away.