Jeff Jarvis’ idea that news organizations agree on some tags and then tag news as “orignal reporting,” maybe with other tags like “edited,” or something, would help readers and search engines. Now the “decider” for news is usually just recency.

The idea of rewarding the original version of a story, rather than the 19th nervous rewrite, which is reverse syndication, would allow the organization that is *paying* the reporter, to capitalize on traffic to the story.

I’m still thinking about Jeff’s arguments on why the AP should die. The rel tag is an idea whose time is coming, if not all ready arrived:

Use the rel=”source” attribute of the <link> and <a> tags to explicitly link to the sources you used writing an article.

If every news story carried a switch identifying original reporting, then aggregators like GoogleNews and Daylife (where I’m a partner) could give precedence to and link to that journalism at its source, helping support that reporting in the link economy.

via BuzzMachine.

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