Re: Centralized Linux announcements/news list?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@seul.org>]

In message <Pine.LNX.3.96.980729102533.4053A-100000@utopia.tx.nu>, dave@whitinger.net writes:
>Roger,
>
>Myself and Zach Beane (of GIMP News fame) had talked about doing this
>last summer.
>
>The problem is, most people are not currently interested in having a
>centralized location for news.
>
>I ended up opening Three Point's Linux News Wire, converting my site from
>a web-based news site, to a moderated mailing list news site.
>
>The result has been positive - I've been able to get news out immediately,
>via E-Mail, and the other sites can pick this information up and update
>their own pages.
>
>I would love to see Linux News centralized.  It's really just a matter of
>figuring out who is going to be the carrier.
>
>Dave

I've heard back from you, Christopher Brown, and scoop so far. I think
the correct thing to do is to develop a sort of "news API", so that news
can be transmitted in a common form that people can use automatically.
That way, news could be sent out to a bunch of places at once in a format
that they all like; we have a standard news protocol, rather than a
centralized news location/list. 

This would behave similarly to network news, except presumably there would
be fewer nodes. LDAP is a possibility for this, but I don't know enough
about it to know if it's suitable (it's been suggested that it's still
too centralized for our purposes). Christopher suggested a format similar
to that of rpm2html (http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/).

One of the strengths of Linux is the fact that things are largely not highly
centralized; building such a "distributed database" of announcement
information would be a further extension of this.

Let me know what you think,
--Roger