As my strategy for Coastsider develops, two things become clear: the focus of the site must be ruthlessly local, and I would love to have a general news feed.
The local focus is key. I’m simply not running stories that don’t directly impact my local community. That not only gives the site its character, it makes a lot of decisions about what to include and what not to include a lot easier.
But I also know that it would improve Coastsider’s role as a daily habit for my readers if I had news headlines on the site. The problem is that no general news feed that I would want to run (NY Times, BBC, NPR, Washington Post, Yahoo, Google, etc.) can be featured on a commercial site.
I sort of get that rationale, and I expect it to change as we become more comfortable with syndication. But I’m not sure what to do in the meantime.
It seems to me that it would be possible for sites like mine to pool their resources and link to interesting state, national, international, business, and technology stories. These links could be aggregated and filtered and delivered to participants. The closest thing to this now is the most-linked list on Technorati, but it’s a little raw and also not available for syndication.
This would be a great open-source project. It’s well-defined, doable, and would be a great resource for the community.