Yesterday I posted an item that about collaboration in the news industry to help disseminate critical information. #
An idea for the news industry to collaborate on. Sometimes a news org takes down the paywall on a story because it's important that everyone see it. Make an RSS feed that combines all such stories across all pubs. Make spreading the news even more efficient.#
A simple idea, really -- not much tech, and news orgs are already doing it. The post got a lot of traction on Twitter, and favorable notice from a fair number of people inside news orgs, people who would be critical to making this idea a reality.#
So what's needed, technically, beyond what's already there? Probably just this -- a way to tell, in an RSS feed, that an item is outside the paywall. #
How to do that? Create a namespace, anyone can do that. Call it (say) the urgentNews namespace. You could have its url point to this post if you like.#
To begin with the namespace has one element, isOutsidePaywall.#
This is what an item might look like for such a news item.#
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam.</description>#
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)