Proposal Status

[Patrick]

My name is Patrick O'Lone - I manage a development staff for a company
called Townnews (http://www.townnews.com/). My company deals with a
number of newspaper organizations nationwide and I'm interested in
suggesting adoption of a microformat to improve searchability.
However, if none of the major search engines (Yahoo!, Microsoft, and
Google) are on-board with this - then there is little motivation at
this time to consider adopting this proposal.

It would be great if all search vendors got content the same way - for
example - Yahoo! accepts direct feeds from newspapers in the form of
NewsML. Frankly, I'd rather they spider content and look for a
microformat like this. I would rather shoot off a sitemap with a list
of URLs to pages and magically all the major search engine vendors
know which elements are the headline, byline, and content elements of
the page skipping all navigation and other presentation elements of
the page. I wish they did it the same way - so I don't have to create
a custom export of data for everybody. Speaking on behalf of a vendor
that deals with this everyday - consolidating the delivery mechanism
of search updates would go a long way to garnering buy in from the
hosted service providers.

Another issue I'm interested it in is protection of this enriched
material from those who would steal and re-purpose the content. I know
the AP is talking about releasing something to help protect AP members
from copyright issues, but what provisions are provided in this
standard to help protect the news content? From my perspective, an
obvious issue is that if we enrich the content - it may be to easy to
scrape and place on aggregator sites. This is actually a major concern
for many of our media partners.

I'm looking to push a standard - is hNews the right choice?

[MilesD]

I work for a very large news organization and have been tasked to set
the standard for how our articles should be published across all of
our properties. Eager to implement some microformats to add semantic
value I have found that hAtom falls short for our purposes. I'd be
eager to work with and implement hNews as it is closer to our content
but if it is not moving forward or close to being adopted as a
standard then I don't see the value on our end.


Thoughts? What is the current state of hNews?

Thanks,
Miles