Linux News Standardization/Distribution Project

[Roger Dingledine <arma@seul.org>]

We've been making progress on our proposal to standardize the format and
distribution of Linux news. Our design uses the NNTP protocol to create a
network of servers that will quickly and robustly share news that is
interesting to the Linux community. This will allow websites like Freshmeat
and Slashdot, as well as lists like Threepoint's and linux-announce, to
reduce duplication of effort while still customizing their presentation.
In addition, this will provide a single easy method of submitting an item
of news, whether it's an announcement about a new software release, or a
description of the latest article in Forbes magazine.

The end goal of organizing the Linux announcements and news articles is
to encourage smaller ISVs to port to Linux, since they will see advertising
their software to a wide audience as less of an obstacle. Other important
benefits include greater robustness (from multiple news servers), less work
for the moderators (messages will be presorted and people can specialize in
their favorite type of news, resulting in faster throughput), and a uniform
comprehensive archiving system allowing people to search old articles more
effectively.

We are currently at the point where we are designing the standard format
for a news item. We want to make it rich enough that it provides all the
information that each site wants, but simple enough that we can require
submissions to include all fields. At the same time we're sorting out how
the NNTP-based connections between the servers should work. We've got
Freshmeat and Threepoint in on it, and other groups like Debian and
LinuxMall are interested. We need more news sites to provide input and
feedback, to make sure everybody will want to use the system once it's
ready.  

If you're interested, please check out our webpage at
http://linuxunited.org/projects/news/ and subscribe to the mailing list
(send mail to majordomo@linuxunited.org with body 'subscribe lu-news').

Thanks for your time (this is the last mail I will send directly about this),
--Roger (SEUL sysarch)