[suggestion] sitemaps, but in proper format

[W13]

Here's Google's specification (well, the Sitemap Protocol) on the NEWS SITEMAP - we all have a "news" or "announcements" sub-forum and we'd all love to export those topics in the form of a Google compatible sitemap: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...py?answer=42738

Creating News Sitemaps

Before you begin, ensure your site is included in Google News. If it's not, you can request inclusion.

A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with the following differences:

Namespace / URLset tag

* A second namespace for the News schema should be added:

http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9

The urlset tag for a News Sitemap should look like this:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"

xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">

List of URLs

* Each URL may include optional news-specific tags within the News schema, as described in the table below. Example of a URL using all tags:

<url>

<loc>http://mynewssite.com/article123.html</loc>

<news:news>

<news:publication_date>2006-08-14T03:30:00Z</news:publication_date>

<news:keywords>Business, Mergers, Acquisitions</news:keywords>

</news:news>

</url>

The <loc> tag must be a URL to an article page.

News-specific tag definitions:

Tag Required? Description

<publication_date>

Yes Article publication date in W3C format, preferably including a timestamp. If you don't include this field in your Sitemap file, the page itself must include an extractable date. It is very important that Google News correctly understand the publication date of this article. If the Sitemap file doesn't include a date for the article, and the article itself doesn't have an extractable date, the article won't be included in Google News and you'll see a "Date not found" error for the article on the News Crawl errors page in Webmaster Tools.

<keywords>

Optional A comma-separated list of keywords describing the content of the article. Keywords may be drawn from, but are not limited to, the list of existing Google News categories.

*

All articles in a News Sitemap must have the same publication label. Roughly speaking, a publication label specifies the publication name and language. For instance, if a site publishes The Example Times (English) and Journal Exemplaire (Fran

[bfarber]

I'm not confident that many IPB installations are included in Google News personally.