HNews, which is an extension of the hAtom format, only requires content users to specify information about the source organization. In addition, publishers can specify geo-information, a dateline element, license information and information about the code of ethics that governed the behavior of the author of a given site. At its most basic level, hNews, just like other microformats like hCard or hCalendar, allows search engines spiders to identify and read semantic information that would otherwise be buried within a text and would be hard to identify for search engines.

The Good and the Bad

It's noteworthy that the AP, which has had a rather contemptuous relationship with the Internet, would push this standard, which would only make it easier for search engines and mash-up tools to discover and classify content. At the same time, though, hNews is also a central part of the AP's controversial 'news registry' project, which is meant to track AP content across the web and to make sure that it is not misappropriated.

While the hNews microformat is definitely an interesting development, we can't help but wonder about its role in the AP registry project. Today's hNews press release makes no mention of this project (unlike the press release that announced the registry), so there is some hope that the AP has given up on this scheme or is at least trying to downplay hNews' importance in it.

Writes Marquez, "Tom Curley did not clarify how a product that provided some news earlier would work or specify the target customers for the potential new service." However, more than anyone, we know the value of this service.

Independent bloggers continually struggle to scoop rival outlets to the point that embargoed releases are often broken. Some outlets have even chosen to forgo embargoes all together; however, ReadWriteWeb makes every effort to honor them. To a tech blogger, a 30 minute lead may mean the difference between the front pages of Digg, Techmeme and major traditional outlets, or appearing like a pack journalist. The groups that purchase a 30 minute lead on tech stories will solidify a huge influx in feed subscribers and mobile app downloads and as a result, gain more favor with advertisers.

Photo Credit: Marina Campos Vinhal

While this is perhaps one of the first major news organizations to codify and automate the tracking of copyright violations on the web, several large organizations employ automated tracking to protect their content from misappropriation. In particular, photo organizations such as Getty and Corbis have worked with PicScout's Image Tracker for a number of years to seek out and confront copyright infringers. However, where Getty and Corbis can make clear claims to their licensed stock photography, the AP's claims to news-related content is blurry. Still, the blogosphere will have to tread lightly when it comes to using AP-related sources.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.

The AP Marketplace interface looks like a sophisticated, multi-media RSS reader but with limited sources. Publishers set up a workflow that lets editors send selected media items directly from the reader out onto the paper's website.

Below, the AP newsreader, click to view full screen image.

It's very reminiscent of of the CMS built by the Crowd Fusion team, which we profiled last week. There's one huge difference though between the AP's project and things like the Crowd Fusion project, the red-hot world of cool-hunting aggregation and even the new publishing strategy of web giants like Yahoo and AOL. The AP service finds and publishes AP stories, not content from around the whole web.

There was a time when it must have been hard to imagine getting more news to choose from than what the wires brought publishers each day. That time has passed and while the small Midwestern US newspapers that the AP highlights as happy users of the Marketplace may be on board - it's hard to say how for how long readers will remain excited about AP fueled news websites. Especially once they discover a little more about how the internet works. (We don't mean to be critical of Mid Westerners, they were just the demographic of several AP demo sites.)

The online research tools used by financial professionals, for example, could probably slap this service both ways to Sunday before it knew which way was up. The AP says, though, that many local papers find their readers overjoyed with the breadth of topical AP content published to content sections or niche websites.

Left: The North West Arkansas biker scene had nothing like this news site before the AP Exchange came to town, the AP says. This kind of site does look like a good idea for everyone.

Training Component

One very interesting part of the AP Marketplace is that it's very search-centric and the wire service offers weekly 30 minute-long classes in online search skills. The AP Exchange School of Search is a great idea.

Not all parts of the program are working well, admittedly. The Exchange "blog" and community on Ning are dead, for example. Perhaps early participants learned enough to escape out into the web at large.

News Publishing Around the Web

A year ago media analyst Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post about what Editor 2.0 jobs are shaping up to look like. Two years ago we wrote here about some of the exciting things that AP competitor Reuters is doing. [Disclosure, the Reuters semantic web project Calais is now an RWW sponsor.] The media business blog PaidContent says that the AP Marketplace/Exchange service is pitted against new aggregation services explicitely aimed at replacing the AP, like Politico.

It's a time of deep change in the news media world and though we love the feel of a good local paper and its website - their ongoing success cannot be taken for granted. Tools like the AP Exchange look like a great step to take and we enjoy getting to see what the RSS reader equivalent is inside hundreds of local newsrooms.

Blogsearch in general is rife with spam and Technorati is at a real disadvantage compared to other blogsearch engines, but that's not the company's only problem. What would you like to see Technorati do in order to be relevant again? Below is our wish list.

The number one problem with Technorati is definitely spam blogs showing up in search results. Ask.com's blog search does a decent job of limiting spam by priortizing search results from feeds with a number of subscribers in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. We could write a whole other post about what we wish Ask's blogsearch would do to improve too, though.

Google Blogsearch could take a similar step for spam control by referencing subscriptions in Google Reader. It may already have done so, but there's little evidence of active developement in Google Blogsearch.

When using Technorati, we've taken to running search feed through Yahoo Pipes and filtering out items with relatively low inbound links or from sources with a lot of spam on a given topic. That's not a lot of fun to have to do, but we sure appreciate those numbers being made available in the company's feeds.

Technorati has issued some new guidelines for being included in less spammy search results, but we'll see how well they work over the coming weeks and months. Some of the guidelines seem fairly arbitrary, like publishing a full instead of an excerpted feed and pinging Technorati directly instead of through a 3rd party. We assume that pings from Feedburner will still be welcome.

Uptime

Technorati returns a "we're sorry, there was an error - try again later" message far more than the other blog search engines do. The first several times we tried searching for inbound links to the new spam control announcement today we got that message.

Return sort by authority to blog directory and elsewhere

There was a time when Technorati's Blog Directory was a pretty good place to discover top blogs on any topic. It displayed blogs that had been tagged by authors as relevant to certain topics and let you sort the list by most inbound links in the last 6 months. Inexplicably, the sort by authority option was removed months ago and the blog directory is now under emphasized in favor of various bizarre options for browsing blogs topically. It's now relatively unusable.

If I'm interested in discovering the top blogs about cooking, for example, it sure would be nice if I could navigate directly to http://technorati.com/blogs/tag/cooking and find them in some intelligable order.

Pageview churn

Possibly the most annoying thing about Technorati these days is that search results aren't easy to navigate. From the front page of the site you're taken to full text search results but the headlines on the page don't link to the posts, they link to a Technorati page about the posts. The actual post links are small and grey below the headlines. That's absolutely contemptable.

From other pages, searches will bring you to other search results. The whole thing is ridiculous.

We'll leave complaints about poor, messy site design alone for now - the service has enough other problems. The company is moving its emphasis over to providing an ad network and letting its basic functionality fall by the wayside. Investors have been complaining for some time about Technorati's performance and we're all suffering as a result. Are there not enough ad networks in the world already? Technorati should make its own traffic grow by serving its users better and monetize that. The company tried a number of functional partnerships with other publishers, like the Washington Post for example, but apparently couldn't figure out how to make money from that. That's a shame.

Come on Technorati - we're honestly cheering for you! There's a huge need out there and you could be filling it.

What would readers like to see Technorati do in order to become relevant again? Leave your thoughts in comments, the company is sure to read them and maybe something positive will happen.

Apparently, this is within the limits of Apple's license agreements, but of course, final approval of new apps is completely in the hands of Apple.

The lack of copy and paste on the iPhone is definitely holding back a lot of functionality. While it would be easy to write a simple word-processor or blogging tool for the iPhone (and some have done so), they will only really become useful once you can copy a URL from Safari into the Wordpress or Typepad editor or a piece of text from Safari into a notepad application.

What Will Apple Do?

OpenClip is mostly a band-aid right now. Apple will release copy and paste sooner or later and given that Apple's own applications like Safari aren't very likely to support OpenClip very soon, the current solution will remain of limited use, but at least it will show the potential and give application developers an idea for what they will be able to do once this becomes a standard feature (and yes - it really should have been a standard feature of the first iPhone firmware...).

Here is a video of OpenClip in action:

The practice generally is a great one: a website's visitors get exposed to the most interesting news on a given topic, selected by a trusted editorial website, that website gets cache, traffic and search engine optimization and the linked-to sources get links and traffic. Not everyone is excited about the idea, though.

The Details

Cadenhead explains: "None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words -- and five of the six have a user-created headline."

Some of the excerpts included in the complaint do seem disrespectfully long, but who's counting? The usually brilliant media critic Jeff Jarvis thinks the best response is to reproduce an AP story in full on blogs around the web but that hardly seems like an appropriate response to a genuinely complicated situation.

Cadenhead writes that the AP has filed suit against two other parties for similar offenses already. "AP has filed copyright lawsuits against the VeriSign division Moreover last fall and another against the Florida company All Headline News this year. I have no desire to be the third member of that club, but sharing links to news stories of interest has become an essential component of how millions of people read and evaluate the news today. When linking to articles, bloggers commonly include excerpts of the article for the purposes of criticism or discussion."

Update: The AP responds in comments below. Feel free to discuss.

Context in a Changing Media World

This sounds like a really stupid legal strategy by the AP, for one thing they are threatening their own inbound links and search juice. Lawsuits and legal threats seem like one of the weakest evolutionary strategies imaginable during a time of intense media upheaval.

Either way, other aggregators should take note. I've done things like this myself numerous times in my private consulting practice and we're seeing a growing number of venture funded services offering this kind of quick aggregation and excerpting functionality to their customers - in some cases major media outlets. (Watch this space Monday night for an in-depth embargoed review of one of the hottest new services along these lines.)

Not at all ironically, we found this story via Gabe Rivera, founder of aggregation service Techmeme, on Twitter. Rivera is probably paying relatively close attention to the story. His site is a great example of terrific value that aggregators can deliver to audiences, and potentially to publishers, through the use of respectfully short, automated excerpting.

There's a certain social contract emerging where readers expect full RSS feeds to be published with the understanding that they will not engage in widespread republishing of the full feeds on other sites. In this case, the AP is not holding up its side of that social contract. Maybe it doesn't want to be a participant in the society of new online media.