Campaign urges BBC News to release full text RSS feeds | Hacker News Reader

Campaign urges BBC News to release full text RSS feeds

journalism.co.uk

22 pointspclark20 comments

The Guardian (disclaimer: my employer) are one of the only newspapers in the world to provide full content RSS feeds: http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2008/oct/22/fu...

are you the simonw involved with the API project?

Yes, and the MP's expenses project.

Awesome. We're based in Cambridge [UK] so if you ever want to chat news over a beer ...

I don't get up there often, but the Guardian is right next to Kings Cross - drop me a line at simon.willison@guardian dot couk if you're in the area.

I have to say: this is how the Guardian won me over as a regular reader.

I'd actually prefer a choice between summarized and full content. I've got The Guardian's feed on my phone, but it's awkward browsing it because of the lengthy articles. I'd prefer a summarized feed for mobile devices.

Given that the tax payers (and I'm one of them!) fund the BBC, we shouldn't be needing to demand this from them. They should've done it ages ago without prompting. It's our money that paid for it and we should have unfettered access.

Come on Beebs, release your feeds!

I'm seeing a parallel to government funded academic research that comes with stipulations that the resulting publications should be Open Access.

that was kind of my point, but I didn't want to sound too aggressive by saying that

yet ;)

Well someone needs to hammer the point home.

Also, this may fall on very favourable ears: part of the most recent govrenment, ummm, cabinet improvement was a move to open up the UK government's data. RWW has a nice piece on it: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_goverment_berners-...

And who's in charge of this? None other than Tim Berners-Lee.

Hmmm.... I wonder if they'll let him do what he really wants to do with it? The UK govt has made a number of high-profile - dare I say, "celebrity" - appointments at the moment (see also Alan Sugar, Martha Lane Fox). So do they want the best person for the job, or is it just a matter of the publicity and the prestige? As a citizen, I think TBL is an excellent choice for the job. Will the govt be able to stomach his changes? I sincerely hope we don't see him resigning from his post in 6 months, citing "unassailable differences of viewpoint with his employer".

I strongly agree. There's a license fee in Ireland too (where I'm from) and they do the same thing, one sentence news feeds. If you're getting funded by mandatory public contributions, then you don't really own your content, the public does.

I don't care if the BBC's management wants to drive people to their website. In fact, I don't care about the wants of the BBC management at all. Besides, the textual news content even on the website is pretty shallow. People will still visit the website to get more information by watching a video.

Of course the BBC sometimes (often?) take their news from the agencies (PA, AP, etc.) and then it gets complicated.

(and let's not even start on what the Daily Fail and other vocal competitors will say.)

For UK readers, the majority of which are license fee payers, I agree.

But I'm not sure about international visitors as the BBC generates revenue from ads shown on their site, so I'm not sure if it would make sound financial sense and be good use of the taxpayers money if it would impact their revenue stream. The downside is that people using online readers would be hit in the cross-fire, but that's unavoidable.

what ads?

The BBC shows ads on its website to non-UK visitors and have done since 2007. From http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/bbcworldwide/worldwidestori...:

"The BBC Trust has approved proposals for the BBC to establish bbc.com, a commercial venture to offer advertising on the BBC's international online service for users outside the UK. UK users' experience of bbc.co.uk will not be affected.

...

bbc.com will use robust geo-IP technology (see Editor's Notes) to separate out international visitors to the site."

From these ads, they made £1.5m ($3m) in the 5 months after launch (from the BBC Annnual Report at http://www.bbcworldwide.com/annualreviews/review2008/Digital...).

they should just put them in the full article feed, then

This would be pretty useful. The best use of the BBC's RSS feeds that I've seen was on a ferry and they had BBC screens showing the latest news.

here's the direct url: http://bbcfree.net

Until they do implement this, there's always http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

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