Amazoning and Aggregating - the new news

— Published May 2nd, 2003  |  by David Moore

Newspapers produce more content online than almost anyone. Writing is their business, so why don't newspaper sites work as well as they should?

Currently each paper has its own site, with the navigation following the print model - front page, sports, business, technology and the rest. It's clear, but it doesn't take full advantage of all the Internet offers.

Two other approaches to the news might work better: amazoning and aggregating.

Let's look at amazoning first: surrounding news stories with the sort of support and extras familiar to shoppers at Amazon.

The smart people at Hypergene have written a now-famous white paper on the subject, looking at what would happen if in addition to the basic story, we got material such as recent reader comments, links to related stories, a chance to rate the piece, and information on how many people have read the story.

Hypergene say, 'a successful news Web site is a platform that supports social interaction around the story,' I'd argue that the same goes for most other content-rich sites.

This is the bells and whistles approach, designed to enrich a user's experience of the story. Aggregating might help people find the story in the first place.

News aggregators have been around in different forms for a long while (anyone remember PointCast?), but new protocols such as RSS (Rich Site Summary) have created powerful systems that are much easier to set up and use.

A sites can be configured to output headlines and summaries of all its new content. Using a small desktop application (for example NetNewsWire for Mac or AmphetaDesk for PC) you subscribe to these feeds and are delivered regular updates whenever you choose.

If a headline or summary catches your eye, you can follow the link to the full story, bringing you to the website for the amazoned experience.

There are several benefits to this - firstly, you can get the headlines from the sources you select delivered to the one place, which saves you browsing through all your bookmarked sites.

Secondly, since it's relatively simple to output the necessary RSS information, it's not just big-budget sites that come to you - bloggers and non-profits can use RSS just as easily.

Seldom has a new application impressed me more than NetNewsWire Lite. I've seen the future of newspapers, and it doesn't look like a newspaper at all.

So what can we learn from this if we're creating or managing content for our own organisations? The amazoning approach shows the benefit of providing a range of supporting material around our core content.

The aggregating approach shows how we can go beyond the Web to offer information in a valuable and flexible format. There's no reason why regular visitors to your site shouldn't sign up for the RSS feed of your press releases or events calendar, for example.

Given the increasing problems with spam, RSS feeds might offer an easier way for organisations to reach their consumers than an email newsletter. When used together, as on the Guardian Unlimited sites, amazoning and aggregating look like the new news.

Related Links:

• AmphetaDesk - [http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/]
• NetNewsWire - [http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/]
• Amazoning the News white paper: - [http://www.hypergene.net/ideas/amazon.html]
• Guardian Unlimited - [http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk]
• Intro to RSS [http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/]