I wrote a piece once asking how hackathons work. 

Now I'm at a hackathon in Manhattan, and I'm making it work for me. 

I came here with a project.  

As you may know, I've been working on something called FeedHose, which does for feeds what the Twitter firehose does for tweetstreams.  

What comes out the other end of this bootstrap is a fast-updating River of News. Problem is I design some ugly rivers. Everyone says so. What I want is a beautiful river, without giving up the simplicity.  

So I approached Jeremy Zilar who works at the Times, who hooked my East-Village river up to the LEV website. I said Jeremy wouldn't you like it if my river were a little prettier. So he introduced me to Jeff Marx, who works at the Journal-News. He's busily designing a new river format for us. "You might not like what I do," he says. True, I say. That's why I'm writing a blog post so you all can participate if you'd like. I'll have a pointer to Jeff's work soon. 

And Jeremy is working on another project right now, but I expect to hijack him as well. And Matt Diaz. And Matt Terenzio.  

Jeff has a first effort. "It's not much yet," he says.  

But it's something -- I say!