*** 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. ***
