Sounds cool. I have also been thinking about developing a ready-made Django skeleton with an architecture similar to this. Our publishing looks like this: Django -> Redis -> Express.js -> Browser

Redis really just serves as our bridge, the actual pub/sub happens in socket.io in the express app. The coolest part of this is that when a Django model is updated, we serialize it to its API representation, send that through the wire. On the client, the Backbone model is bound to this event and updates in place.