Before reading this, you may want to read about the Social Media Release.
Interesting. I got turned on to this last night at the Boston SMG event. If adding video and Delicious links (why Delicious?) and tags to press releases is what this is all about, its a good start.
I just spent an hour figuring out why my tags were not showing up properly in Ecto, my superb blog editor. Turns out there are subklte, and not so subtle differences between different flavors of posting mechanisms, including TypePad, Blogger, MovableType, MetaWeblog and Atom.
How about digging into the Atom specification and seeing what’s in there that could be used to further improve the usability and readability of news? We need some technologists that can translate between the goals of the SMR and the features of these specifications.
Remember, AJAX has been around for years, it’s plain old xml and Javascript. What parts of the Atom specification are well suited to address the needs of the SMR? I think it’s time to find out.
Ok, back to my initial thoughts. First, nobody is going to pay attention to the spec, which is actually more like a draft series of guidelines, until they have a reason to do so. I don’t see the benefits of following the SMR format in it’s current format as enough reason to change the way things are done today.
I’m certain this will change over time as the right influencers start evangelizing the cause.
Until then, companies will still be “market leading”, non-news will continue to flood the wires and reporters will still have to cobble together information from many different sources manually.
Clarification, tags are not “Technorati” or any other company. They can be used/accesed via many blog and traditional search engines. In fact, I bet someone will come up with a specific Delicious clone for press releases. Only a million people use Delicious, whereas many more use Yahoo’s social bookmarking service. And why Flickr? I love and use it daily, but who decided that was the place to stuff all your images? Just wondering if anyone is thinking about this stuff.
I can see parsers going through press releases, finding tags, looking up related tags, jumping over to other releases and digging up much deeper meaning in terms of the how the news relates to the space the company competes in.
As people are saying, reformatting junk doesn’t do anyone any good, and reporters dont’ necessarily want to spend their days watching media videos on YouTube.
The specification seems more like a better practices guide at this point. I was expecting more RSS, search and linking capabilities, which is what real microformats are about. After emailing back and forth a few times with Todd Defren, I’m starting to better understand the whole initiative, and I look forward to learning more about it and turning people onto it.