Just read a great article here at Howard Owen’s blog discussing the use of free technology and newspapers. His story focuses on using Yahoo’s Pipes service to scrape their own newspaper’s syndication feed for related content. It’s an ingenious idea and one I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own.
I’ll explain how I found the post. I was searching Google for, “using free tools to improve newspaper website.” Talk about specific. The entry was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, though perhaps a bit too specific. It’s great to see how people are enhancing their site, but I was wondering how much a local paper could get away with co-opting services that are already existent.
One such idea is instead of hosting your own blogs (though the ad revenue is lucrative) simply host a blog directory for the area. Provide tips on how to blog effectively, how to set one up and what privacy issues to be aware of. A similar idea could be done with image gallery sites like Flickr and Picasa.
The idea is to avoid two major problems:
- Re-inventing software that already works very well
- Getting people to sign up for yet another login at yet another site (YALaYAS)
