Reuters news stories have been available via RSS syndication through
Yahoo news and its my.yahoo aggregator, as well as various news
"scraping" sites that generate RSS feeds, but now Reuters apparently
has become the first major wire service to directly feed story
summaries to readers as RSS.
The Reuters RSS page lists sixteen feeds, from technology, world, national and business wires to a category called "OddlyEnoughNews"
in which three out of 10 headlines today have the verb "bite." The
feeds are all available "as a free service to any individual user or
non-profit organization that would like to access it for non-commercial
use."
The feeds, syndicated onto a non-profit weblog like this one, would look like this:
- Woman Reports Biting the Bullet in Hotdog.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California woman claimed she swallowed a live
bullet and bit into a second round while eating a hotdog, and says she
has the X-rays to prove it.
- Woman Bites Off Attacker's Lip.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A woman bit off the lower lip of a fugitive
man she said attacked her outside her house in the South African town
of Tzaneen, police said on Friday.
- Man Bites Dog.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A man fleeing police in the South African city
of Durban bit the dog and police officer ordered to apprehend him,
police said on Friday.
For a better example of what a the RSS subscriptions might bring, here aggregator samples with the full contents of a couple of today's Reuters channels.
RSS evangelist Dave Winer is so happy about Reuters RSS that he's repeating himself...
But RSS is hardly the first XML format in Reuters' professional
toolbox. The company, which started out selling news by carrier pigeon,
has provided XML-based news and financial services for at least four years, released news archives in XML for research purposes, offers XML-based weather reports, and helped develop NewsML. (For the curious, here's more on who uses NewsML.)
Elsewhere on the RSS front, esteemed digital journalism watcher J.D. Lassica has published an intro to RSS aggreagators in the Online Journalism Review (which doesn't have an RSS feed of its own yet)... Userland Software has updated its "All About RSS" page as part of its site design for Radio Userland... and XML.com has reported on syndication standards and the News Summit discussions of them a few months ago.
3:36:30 PM 
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