Dave Winer announced the “bomblet” he was hyping on his site yesterday — a parternship deal with The New York Times to syndicate NYT headlines through Radio. Uh, sorry, this is a step backwards. According to his promotional page on the partnership deal,
The New York Times feeds are only available for Radio 8 users. If you haven’t got Radio yet, you can get a thirty-day free trial. If you already have Radio, you can be subscribing to fresh New York Times headlines in less than one minute.
So you can have a syndicated NYT feed, you just have to use Radio 8.
If City Desk or Blogger or any of his competitors reached such an exclusive partnership with the NYT, Winer would be throwing a royal fit on his web site, complaining about how it locks users into a single vendor (which it does). Why start ghetto-izing syndication just when it’s taking off so successfully?
The only thing Winer’s announcement means is that the NYT is still clueless (and reaffirms a lot of suspicions people had about working with Winer on things like RSS 0.92).