Irish newsroom - one way to implement it

Damien Mulley has an interesting idea for his Newsroom.ie domain, one that a number of Irishblogs have already commented on and which I'll briefly comment on here seeing as the feedback mechanism on his own blog is broken!

I agree with others that it will be quite a challenge to make it work and the biggest obstacles are going to be -

1. WIIFM - What's in it for me?
2. The chicken and the egg

Of course the likes of Wikipedia has ably demonstrated how obstacle (1) can be overcome, but it may be a different kettle of fish motivating people to contribute transient news stories instead of everlasting knowledge. Didn't I read somewhere that even Wikimedia's own news project - Wikinews - hasn't exactly been a roaring success? Still, my own business involves the management of an online community forum for nearly 5,000 people worldwide who have voluntarily contributed nearly a million messages to the biggest knowledge base of its (niche) kind. So I know it can be done!

As for obstacle (2) I would suggest that Damien takes advantage of aggregation services at first to collate tagged stories from the Irish blogosphere. Perhaps he could piggyback off the del.icio.us social bookmarking service. For a start he could could subscribe to RSS feeds for existing tags like 'Ireland' and 'Irish' while he's waiting for a critical mass of Irish bloggers to adopt a special tag, such as 'newsroomie' for instance. Del.icio.us facilitates a syntax to filter tag results by popularity which would satisfy the requirement for bumping stories from backpage to frontpage.

For example let's say I was to post an item here about a business story relating to Shannon Development. I might tag it with the following keywords - business, Limerick, Ireland, newsroomie. This would quickly flow into Damien's RSS aggregator and he would know to file it (or program software to do so) into the Limerick and Business subsections. He could also take advantage of one of the many javascripts available to display RSS feeds directly on the webpage.

The main reason I would advise Damien to implement Newsroom.ie in such a small pieces, loosely joined manner is because it would require very little work for any Irish blogger to contribute. Many of them already tag their blog posts and it would be simple to adapt to a group tagging consensus if necessary. Personally, I'm unlikely to give of my time to post stories directly to a group blog but I wouldn't mind at all tagging my posts to my own blog to channel them to an aggregation service or blogzine.

Well, that's just one idea as to how he might implement Newsroom.ie. However he chooses to to it I wish him well and look forward to contributing.