Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney in 'Up in the Air' lives out of his suitcase and thinks he loves it. This sounds like something Bingham would say in one of his motivational speeches.
My guess is that the address appears that way in the original publication. The web was new then, and the other slash had not yet been deeply ingrained into the culture as it is now.
From a recent New Yorker article: "Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago."
"À la carte" feeds. I'm building this into the site as we speak. There will be a sign up form to create an account and to get a subscriber id. Subscribers can define filters. Within a filter is a list of keywords and a schedule (monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or real-time) to generate a feed that matches your keywords. The "API" then would be HTTP GET and the response is RSS. Simple.
The ui is really nothing special, but that is by design. We want it to work with JavaScript off and to be easily crawled so that Googlebot understands the structure. Spiders and crawlers have yet to catch up with the times and still have difficulty finding their way through sites that use JavaScript for navigation.
Yes. Several of the feed sources we read from publish a headline with barely anything to say within the article, then as the info comes in to them, they republish the same story, each time with minor changes in the headline and adding more meat to the story. The Associated Press is notorious for this. That's how they beat everyone else to the punch every time.