[drn-discuss] Some recent press stories

[James Heald]

Andrea Rota wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 03:19:16PM +0100, James Heald wrote:
> [...]
> 
>>A blog is all very well, but I think that there are some real advantages 
>>to providing a page like Swpatcnino, which can aim to be pretty 
>>comprehensive in terms of links, but limited to just a one-line summary 
>>for each item.
> 
> [...]
> 
>>* the bar is much lower for people adding stories, if they can just put 
>>up the link, and don't need to add any commentary.  (Though they could 
>>write and link one if they want).
>>
>>* it's useful to be able to scan through just the headlines, as a short 
>>index -- much easier than scanning down a whole blog; and easier to find 
>>or spot new items.
>>
>>So hence my suggestion, for someting much more like 
>>http://wiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn   and much less like a blog.
> 
> 
> Easiest way to do this would be: whoever wants to contribute adds an
> entry to her/his own de.lirio.us bookmarks list, with a special tag
> (e.g. "drn.press") and then the RSS feeds with this tag are aggregated
> on http://drn.okfn.org/.
> 
> The news aggregator is already there, and adding feeds can be done by
> any contributor.
> 
> Lightweight, easy and distributed - does it make sense?!
> 

The alterantive, which is perhaps even more entry-level, and FFII has 
found works well, is just to have a wiki page that people add a line to 
the top to, whenever they want to add a link to a story.

As well as being very straightforward, for anybody with write-access to 
the page to be able to do, it also has the advantage that you directly 
control what the listing looks like; it makes it easy for people to add 
follow-up links, eg to comment blogs, or say wiki pages tracking 
particular issues; it is easy to correct mistakes; and it's also very 
easy to remove entries which aren't really on topic.

It's a bit more low-tech, because it means the aggregation is being done 
manually; but in practice, it's no great inconvenience - it only takes a 
moment to add a line to a wiki.