I'm a big believer in designers, programmers, writers, artists, news people all working together.  

So it's in the spirit of a programmer looking for help from designers that I ask the following question. 

What's the best way to display a River of News in a browser? 

A river is a strict reverse-chronology of news items that conform more or less to the elements of a RSS 2.0 <item>. So you could have a title, link, description, publication date, link to comments, categories, or enclosures. There are a few other elements that can be in an item. For a full list, check out the RSS 2.0 spec. It's written so that a designer can make sense of it. 

Here are some examples of rivers: 

1. nytimesriver.com -- designed originally for Blackberries. 

2. Arc90's rendering of the 2006-era river thanks to archive.org. 

3. A screen shot of the Radio 8.0 river, in early 2002. 

4. east-village.org, produced by River2. 

5. Twitter is a river. 

7. Les Orchard's news page (the descriptions would have to be initially expanded to make it fully a river). 

8. Glowdart is very interesting. I'd like to experiment with a UI like this, but one where the user could give it any number of feeds to follow. In other words it's a nice start for a generalized RoN aggregator. 

The design challenge is this. GIven the latest HTML techniques, do a mockup of a great River of News. If it's really something new, I'll put the software behind it and make it live.