[uf-new] PR/Marketing Microformat Proposal

[Shannon Whitley]

Greetings,

The New Media Release Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/newmediarelease) was created last year
by Chris Heuer (Social Media Club).  Its members have been discussing
various options for taking the 100-year-old press release and updating
it for the Internet.  Almost from the beginning, the next version of
the press release was envisioned as a Microformat.  Consequently, the
label, "hRelease," was applied and stuck at an early stage in the
discussions.

In October of this year, I inherited the technical management of the
new media release specification.  I have been working with several
other members of a small working group to create a discussion document
that is based on the business needs of the PR/Marketing community.

Next week, I plan to present the following working document to the New
Media Release Group:

http://www.socialtext.net/hrelease/index.cgi?hrelease

I plan to present it as a discussion document and not a completed
draft.  There will be modifications and additions based on feedback
from the New Media Release Group.  These discussions will be largely
focused on business requirements, as we know that technical
requirements will be discussed in depth at Microformats.org

When the New Media Release Group is ready, we will plan to present a
proposal to this group (Microformats-new).

I anticipate questions from this group regarding our compliance with
the Microformats Process.  Please understand that it is our intent to
follow the process, however, many actions have already taken place
out-of-sequence.  That is the nature of this project's history.

The hRelease working document is an attempt to prototype the new
schema.  As in Rapid Application Development, iterations of the
prototype are expected.

Thank you for your consideration.  This message is just meant as an
introduction and I look forward to presenting a proposal to you in a
few weeks.

Shannon Whitley
New Media Release Working Group