The title of this post was going to be "Community Server Daily News Blows," but that would have been cheap sensationalism and beneath even me. And besides, it would have also been wrong. The [DailyNewsShort] doesn't blow, but it CAN be improved.
Scoble mentioned Mike Gunderloy's Daily Grind in Naked Conversations, praising the Grind but mentioning its distinct shortcoming of having to Url the entire news issue rather than the individual news item. I've noticed this same shortcoming in the [DailyNewsShort], particularly since I search it all of the time. I have the advantage of being its author, so I usually know which section to skip to and find the item I'm looking for, but even that is inefficient.
I want a [DailyNewsShort] that first looks like it does currently, with all of the items assembled as a single blog post and in sections - "Today's News", "The User Experience", "Cool Sites", etc.
What we need to make the [DailyNewsShort] better is to be able to do a search in Community Server and retrieve the ITEM, not the ISSUE. We also need individual item tagging support.
It seems to me there are two assembly approaches to take on this: 1) Pre-production and 2) Post-production.
For a pre-production approach, each news item becomes a separate post, fully searchable with complete tagging support. The individual news items would be published to their own feed as well as being capable of being assembled into a separate Daily News post. An "Assemble" Button would take the contents of these posts, along with the post item’s metadata and assemble them into a single blog post like the current format of the [DailyNewsShort].
Now the post-production assembly approach. The post-production process parses the structured Daily News blog post we currently produce (with strict < div class=”listname” /> and comment data used from the Day One), and publishes the parsed items as individual posts. Post Titles would be generated based on item content and tags would be added separately. I suspect the individual titles would be edited at the same time the item tags are added.
So it seems we're looking at two feeds whether we go with the pre- or post-production assembly method of extending the [DailyNewsShort]. What should we do with the single item feed? It would be a separate cs.org feed not included in the site aggregate feed. Yet this single item blog would be included in the site Search and subscribeable, the best of both worlds.
So that's what I've got on the brain. How or if it's going to happen, I don't know. If you have any ideas, I'm a receptive host.
[tags: Community Server]