We are on the
cusp of something exciting. Thousands of news articles marked up with
with hNews, a microformat for news content funded by the Knight
Foundation, will soon start populating the Internet.
Last
week, hNews became an official draft microformat. Having been proposed
as a new data format and then discussed within the microformats
community, it is now in draft 0.1 at Microformats.org.
This means it has reached a stage where the microformat community
believes it is stable enough for widespread adoption. This also
reaffirms hNews as an open standard, free for anyone to integrate to
their news content, whether they're from big news agencies like AP, a non-profit like OpenDemocracy.net, or individual journalists blogging on WordPress.
We also learned last week that AOL is adopting hNews. Though AOL has yet to make a formal announcement, hNews is already live on a number of its sites, including AOL News. This article, for example, has hNews embedded in its source code.
Then, this week, TownNews announced it was integrating hNews
into its content management system. TownNews provides technology to
support the publication of newspaper interactive editions online. By
integrating hNews to their CMS, they suddenly make it available to up to 1,500 news sites across the U.S.
If these news organizations want to start making their news a lot more
machine-readable -- or "semantic" -- pretty much all they have to do is
flick a switch.
This
news builds on the adoption of hNews by the Associated Press. AP has
not yet made its hNews marked-up content public, but plans to before
the end of this year.
Making News Machine Readable
These
developments are the culmination of the first stage of our transparency
initiative, a non-profit project jointly funded by the Knight
Foundation (we won a Knight News Challenge Award in 2008) and the
MacArthur Foundation. We have also worked with the AP in the latter
stages.
hNews,
for those unfamiliar with it, makes some basic, factual information
about the provenance of an online news article machine-readable. In
other words, it makes distinguishable a lot of information that is
currently indistinguishable on the web (e.g. to search engines). [hNews is not the same as web bug, the data tag that Associated Press is
attaching to its content to help track its use around the web, and
allow it, as I understand it, to create a registry of news usage - who
owns it and how you can use it. AP is layering web bug on top of hNews.]
The
reason hNews is so useful to anyone producing journalism and to the
public is that it helps to differentiate news on the web. At the same
time, it should make news easier to find, give greater credit to the
author (or help "ascribenation",
as Doc Searls called it on LinuxJournal), link the story to the news
principles it adheres to (if any), unlock some of the value of the news
archive, and enable untold unintended consequences.
Currently, only some articles published by AOL, and
a few hundred published by OpenDemocracy.net, the first adopter of
hNews, are marked up. But within a month or so, there will be thousands
and then perhaps hundreds of thousands of stories. Once that happens,
we will actually be able to truly see how helpful hNews can be. The aim
will then be to develop features and tools built on hNews, and begin
benefiting from the marked up information. For example, this could be
done via searches and APIs.
For
us, the Media Standards Trust, the next stage will involve juggling
many balls simultaneously. We need to communicate what hNews is and how
it works to as many people as possible. This means making sure people
realize that hNews is for anyone producing journalism, not just big
news organizations. We also need to develop applications based on hNews
in order to illustrate what it's useful for. And we need to keep
evolving hNews to include additional (optional) semantic information.
At the same time, we'll have to be flexible enough to cope with the
unintended consequences.
We
are still a little ways from seeing what impact hNews will have, but
now we have the opportunity, over the next few months, to see how it
can make news more transparent.
This blog was first published at
PBS MediaShift Idea Lab
Keywords: AOL, AP, hNews, Media Standards Trust, TownNews