A few weeks ago, feeling I was missing most of the WikiLeaks story, I started an aggregator site at wikiriver.org to gather All the news about WikiLeaks in one place, in real time. 

It worked, the site is a valuable resource for people who want to stay informed, not just about the smear campaign, but also about the substance of reports coming out of the professional news organizations and bloggers covering WikiLeaks. 

At the same time, off in a corner, a group of JavaScript programmers were working, open-source style, on new ways to render Rivers. Since the JSON format supported by all the Rivers was the same, all the work previously done applied equally to wikiriver.org. A few days ago we turned the corner and got ready to deploy the work, and now, this morning we're ready to flip the switch. 

Introducing the new beautified version of... 

http://wikiriver.org/  

The new version was designed by Nicolas Gallagher building on the work shared by Martin Duffy in his jQuery templating tutorial. Collaborative development on the River Of News mail list by Shawn McCollum, Ken Booth, Daniel Bachhuber, Havagan and Martimedia.  

This is very much an international effort. Both Martin and Nicolas, the two main contributors, are from the U.K. I am, of course, from the U.S. 

It's a great little community, and hopefully this is not the last project we do together. I have more JSONified data, and more pieces to fit together in the effort to assemble all the parts for an open realtime network for collaboration, outside the corporate blogging silos.  

Finally, for those who aren't running Javascript in the browser, the original version is being updated along with the fancy Javascript version. If you prefer a plain-jane rendering, you should bookmark this page.