How does News Crud work?

Always good to start with a question, don’t you think?

When you add a News Crud article using the form on the front page, the system insists that you choose at least one warning label and enter one Article URL. You can also optionally specify a URL that has further information about the main article you’re submitting.

Submitting the form sets up an entry in the News Crud database for that news article and produces two new pages: one warning page and one information page.

The link that you are given back points to the warning page, here’s an example of a warning page . You can of course send this link to anyone you please. There is a “More” link on that page which points to the information page. Here’s an example of an information page.

Now if someone comes along after you and adds the same article, if they select a different warning label or they specify a different further information link, then those things are just added to the database entry for the main article. This is how you can get multiple further information links listed for a news crud article.

Obviously this system is somewhat open to abuse. We’ll see what happens, I’d rather not insist people log in with their twitter ID or something similar but I might have to. There will also be differences of opinion about what is and isn’t an article bad enough to be included in News Crud. I might end up implementing some form of voting system to take this into account but it’s early days yet.

Another thing that I’m planning to implement but haven’t got round to yet is to automatically tweet the links submitted to News Crud on the @newscrud twitter stream. I’m going to make sure that there is at least a 1 hour delay from when News Crud receives the information to it tweeting the link. This is to ensure I don’t steal anyone’s thunder. I would like bloggers to use it to raise awareness of their blog posts and auto tweeting their links, perhaps before they have a chance to do it on their own twitter feed would be wrong I think – it would be totally counter productive for News Crud to attempt to compete with the very people who I hope will make it a success.

Let me know in the comments if you have any views on what we should do with News Crud to makie it more useful for you.

Thanks