subject: (Fwd) [DW] Online News and Democratic Technology Standards
posted: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 03:23:04 -0000


now seems like a timely moment to mention the e-democracy list
below. Perhaps it would be of interest to note that the edem_elect
list (which is now DO-WIRE I think) is where I originally heard of
THIS list! Full circle... this means.. we are learning.

Stuart

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 09:31:29 -0500
Send reply to: Steven Clift <[email protected]>
From: Steven Clift <[email protected]>
Subject: [DW] Online News and Democratic Technology Standards
To: [email protected]


*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do
***


Most people experience "democracy online" through online news
sites. Online news sites, often a division of a traditional media
outlet, provide political news, analysis and provide many of the
interactive online political discussion spaces on the Internet. I
recently attend a seminar at the new Institute for New Media
Studies
at the University of Minnesota. Nora Paul, the Institute's director,
did a quick study of the top twenty or so online newspaper sites to
determine their base "interactivity" policy. Did those online papers
provide e-mail links to those wrote the articles? About half did and
the larger, more prestigious a paper the less likely they allowed for
easy online comment to journalists.

Enter NewsML from <http://www.iptc.org/> which is being pushed in
large part by Reuters <http://newsshowcase.rtrlondon.co.uk/>.
When I
suggest that we build an Internet that is a democracy network by
nature, NewsML is exactly the kind of technical activity to be
analyzed and influenced with a "democratic" mindset. On Friday I
sent
the NewsML standards e-mail list a message
<http://www.egroups.com/message/newsml/307> asking, "What
feature of
the NewsML standardizes the feedback mechanism to the source
of
stories? One of the important aspects of online news is the ability
to generate a two-way connection between the writer and reader."
Perhaps those "civic technologists" out there could take a look
<http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/DTD/NewsMLv1.0.dtd> and provide
some
analysis on elements that will promote or enable interactivity in
news.

Below are a couple of news stories.

Steven Clift
Democracies Online
http://www.e-democracy.org/do

http://www.tvnewsweb.com/newstalk/2000/10/16amsterdam.shtml
-clip -

The central concept of NewsML is the NewsItem, a file which can
contain various different media text, photos, graphics and/or video.
It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video,
text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites,
mobile phones, high-end desktops, interactive television and any
other
device. Text news as well as photos and video files can be delivered
either as independent media streams or as linked multimedia news
packages.

According to Reuters, NewsML enables news publishers in all
market
sectors to create a higher quality product by: 1. providing access to
all the available media to tell a story; 2. clearly identifying the
details of a story leading to quicker production and editorial
decisions; 3.allowing stories to be delivered to a range of different
devices (mobile, desktop, Personal Digital Assistant); 4. enabling
greater description of data making it easier for publishers to provide
updates as stories develop.

According to its developers, NewsML should also provide more
accurate
search and information management, and more personalized news -
users
can select the stories of most interest to them and have these
delivered to their preferred device.

From:
http://news.cnet.com:80/news/0-1005-200-3163976.html


News industry group adopts Web standard
By Reuters
Special to CNET News.com
October 11, 2000, 11:15 a.m. PT

LONDON--The world's news industry group said on Wednesday it is
adopting a new markup language for computers that structures the
graphs, pictures, video clips and millions of words it produces each
day.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) said in
a
statement that NewsML, which is based on Extensible Markup
Language
(XML), has already been tested and is ready for use.

Reuters Group, Agence France-Presse, BusinessWire, Press
Association,
ScreamingMedia, UPI and Dow Jones's WSJ.com have already
said they
will use the new standard.

NewsML should make producing electronic news for a huge array of
different uses and different people far more efficient. It is a
standard for packaging electronic content and structuring
multimedia
news so that appropriate types of media can be delivered to devices
ranging from PCs to mobile phones.

With journalism going increasingly digital--and with database
archives
proliferating--NewsML has been designed to make it easier for news
organizations to put together multimedia stories, adapt them, store
them and find them later.

- clip -


*** Please send submissions to: [email protected] ***
*** To subscribe, e-mail: [email protected] ***
*** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE ***
*** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE ***

*** Please forward this post to others and encourage ***
*** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***



------- End of forwarded message -------

generated by msg2page 0.06 on Jul 21, 2006 at 19:04:59

 search: