The hNews microformat may revolutionize how readers interact with our news

One of the big new things in online news is going to be hNews, which is a type of “microformat.”

Microformats have been around for a few years. They are basically little libraries of tags that can be wrapped around content online to help make that content more easily readable by machines. The benefit of this is that most of these tags are semantic, meaning that when a computer reads the content, it will be able to tell, from the microformat tags, whether the text it’s reading is a headline, a byline or even a postal code.

Imagine this: you visit one of your favorite news sites and the homepage displays a notification that an article you read yesterday has been updated with new information, and a story you read last week has been corrected. The notification enables you to click on a link and read the correction, or to be taken to the updated story.

After checking those items, you continue reading articles on the site, and each story includes a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story (anonymous, etc.), as well as a link to the organization’s relevant policies and standards. If you spot an error in an article, you can easily submit a request for correction via that same info-box. And if the article is corrected, you’ll receive a notification during a future visit to the site.

(Via Columbia Journalism Review)

Neat, huh? hNews should be built in to our new Blox-based Web site. We’ll have to see what TownNews will allow us to do with it.

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4. Most readers would find a free alternative if their paper started charging for content