More than one river
Michael Levin's Weblog : Weblog
Dave Winer created Rivers of News by parsing out the NYTimes.com RSS feed. The NYTimes thought it was such a good idea, they rolled their own: http://mobile.nytimes.com/. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I can tell you that if the Times just rolled this out today, they've been working on this for a pretty long time, certainly predating the whole river of news thing. I'm also surprised that the NYT has just let the whole nytriver thing go by, which also leads me to suspect that they haven't heard about it yet.
(Disclaimer: I am a former New York Times employee.)