CoPress

Here are the top links you should check out over the weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• AP, Media Standards Trust Propose News Microformat – Just announced yesterday, the microformat means a markup specifically for the type of metadata in news articles. They want to make the content even more machine-readable such that more data is exposed in search results. Check out the draft for the spec and a conversation that’s already started in the Google Group. Very interesting.
• Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up – Joey says this is a solid roundup.
• If you were starting a news organization, where would you put your initial efforts? – Not surprisingly, existing news organizations should be following this advice too. Martin starts out with practical suggestions, and many people weigh in with their input in the comments
• Vote for 2.9 Media Features – WordPress wants your input on what should be in version 2.9.

All of the activity really happened on the wiki this week. Will Davis deserves mad props for doing most of the work getting Semantic MediaWiki working. Check out “Newspapers by age” for an example of how it works. Basically, what it will allow us to do is aggregate all of the semi-structured data in the infoboxes. At the moment, it just lets us then create charts of the data but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to incorporate it into search and navigation as well.

Claire Gould from The College Voice also added a bunch of information about their publication to the wiki, and Rick Martinez has launched a shell of a community wiki for FIU.

Yes, we missed last week. Here are the top links for the last two weeks that you should check out over the holiday weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Two Knight News Challenge projects have been open-sourced: EveryBlock and ReportingOn. With the right developers and the right ideas, both of these code bases could be the foundation for something really cool at a student newspaper. Andrew Dunn is already thinking about a “Ask the Reporter”-style website.
• Gazette Communications is looking for an Online News Editor with a keen eye for innovation. My prediction: they are going to have a number of applications from highly-qualified recent graduates. This is one of those companies you’d want to start a 21st century career with.
• We’ve all heard a number of theses on why industries fail but most put fault with the leadership. Michael Nielsen’s essay on scientific publishing posits another hypothesis: the leading companies are too good at what they do in their industry, are highly geared towards being too good, and are nearly impossible to reorient when the industry evolves or no longer matters.
• Mark Briggs covers all of the metrics you might want to consider as benchmarks for your newsroom. Watch his blog for a series of posts from his upcoming textbook, to be published this fall.

I’m considering changing the format of this weekly post to be a more informal synthesis of the things that have happened in the past week. If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know.

Around the network, Sean Sullivan is looking for opinions on the best wiki for putting together a history of a school budget crisis (I assume he’s looking for both the best software and approach). If the project is big enough to merit the investment, I’d say MediaWiki would be the tool of choice. It’s themeable and has a plugin architecture that lets you extend it. Will Davis and I are going to be playing with the Semantic MediaWiki extension so that you can indicate some information as structured data and do cool things with the aggregate of it (related: check out the information Will added to the profile of The Maine Campus; this is going to be really cool when we have this type of information on a number of newspapers).

Rick Martinez had the first meeting for FIUSM developers earlier today. I’ll see if I can get him to give us some clues on what they’ll be working on this year. Developers plural must mean that FIUSM is going to be doing more than basic website maintenance this coming year.

Rick Martinez’s “Summer of Code” plans for Nameless CMS, a Ruby on Rails option that is on its way to becoming open source, include writing a Ruby library for creating and working with InCopy files, an overhaul of the admin to incorporate workflow features, and an alpha release for people to play with. If you’re a RoR developer, he’s looking for people to collaborate with too.

Host(s): Bryan Murley, Daniel Bachhuber

Guest(s): Rick Martinez

Summary: A discussion about the development of FIUSM.com‘s content management system built on Ruby on Rails, Nameless CMS.

Links

• FIUSM.com
• Ruby on Rails
• Nameless CMS

Up next

Scott Karp of Publish2 on link journalism and how it might apply to student media.

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