All links lead to Rome

Save and share links have cropped up all over on news sites this past year, especially from web services del.icio.us, digg and Facebook. Examples here, here and here.Some newspaper sites are displaying track backs from blogs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a news site that doesn’t offer XML syndication, even if it’s truncated to headlines only.

I’ve even heard rumblings from some news organizations planning to offer headline widgets for bloggers, in the hopes news sites can tap new audiences.

That’s all fine and good, but what invariably happens when someone follows a link to a web page is that they immediately leave it once they’re finished with it, especially when they come from digg, del.icio.us or Facebook.

So what’s a Web site to do once they attract an audience through these referrals? There’s always been talk about providing interactive news for online reader, through slide shows, video and Flash whatnots. Related content is nice, but who decides what’s related? Robots and producers, that’s who.

Jeff Jarvis got a look at the new USA Today where the site begins using machine generated tags. Jarvis ponders, “given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time.” But that “biorhythm of news” is mostly a byproduct of traditional news media: TV and Newspapers, one with limited time, the other with limited space.

The Web has neither restraint. Articles and photo and video can sit on a server indefinitely. News becomes evergreen. Old news may be new news to someone and even if it’s not, that content may still be relevant to someone else.

So why not make the news itself interactive by letting users decide where it should go? Why not break free of the traditional categories (news, sports, business, features, etc.) and let readers create their own categories?

And then set your Web team loose on building XML feeds and headline widgets based around those categories, or blocks of categories, thus making those tools relevant to people looking to syndicate and share specific types of information.