Dave is announcing his new partnership later today. My guess is that he's found a way to formally bring in the big journalism guns (think The New York Times) into the Radio community. And I say "formally" because I've been receiving news feeds from The New York Times for a long time already... all done from Radio.

But what does the NYT want with UserLand? Will they set-up a community server (or many, designed around the various news sections already in the paper) and distribute news that way? A kind of Pointcast 2002? Somehow, I don't think so. But if indeed this new partnership is with the NYT, then it must revolve about the NYT's use of UserLand technology (and not UserLand's use of the NYT's news feeds).

I have, however, noticed the following change: I've been subscribed to the New York Times' Technology news feed for a while now, using this url:

http://www.newsisfree.com/HPE/xml/feeds/62/162.xml

Tonight, I subscribed to their Opinion news feed, and this is the url:

http://radiouser:Csm!]-tvMm@partners.userland.com/nyt/opinion.xml

The website partners.userland.com (taken from that url) asks for a username and password to get in. If you plug-in the values on the above url (user:radiouser / pass:Csm!]-tvMm) you'll see a site with a folder named nyt which includes all the xml feeds.

Also, on the page where I just subscribed, Dave says:

In addition to all the fantastic XML news sources that Radio can bring you, now for the first time, direct from the source, we are proud to offer fresh headlines from The New York Times, every hour, on the News Aggregator page in Radio UserLand.

The New York Times feeds are only available for Radio 8 users.

From this, it seems that UserLand now has some kind of exclusive agreement with the NYT.

Well, soon we shall all know.

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