The Independent newspaper has introduced a fascinating new feature on the site that allows users to follow articles by individual writers and news about specific football teams via Facebook.

It’s one of those ideas so simple you wonder why no one else appears to have done it before*: instead of just ‘liking’ individual articles, or having to trudge off to Facebook to see if there’s a relevant page you can become a fan of, the Indie have applied the technology behind the ‘Like’ button to make the process of following specific news feeds more intuitive.

To that end, you can pick your favourite football team from this page or click on the ‘Like’ button at the head of any commentator’s homepage. The Independent’s Jack Riley says that the feature will be rolled out to columnists next, followed by public figures, places, political parties, and countries.

The move is likely to pour extra fuel on the overblown ‘RSS is dying‘ discussion that has been taking place recently. The Guardian’s hugely impressive hackable RSS feeds (with full content) are somewhat put in the shade by this move – but then the Guardian have generated enormous goodwill in the development community for that, and continue to innovate. Both strategies have benefits.

At the moment the Independent’s new Facebook feature is plugged at the end of each article by the relevant commentator or about a particular club. It’s not the best place to put given how many people read articles through to the end, nor the best designed to catch the eye, and it will be interesting to see whether the placement and design changes as the feature is rolled out.

It will also be interesting to see how quickly other news organisations copy the innovation.

*If I told you I said this deliberately in the hope someone would point me to a previous example – would you believe me? Martin Stabe in the comments points to The Sporting News as one organisation that got here first. And David Moynihan points out that NME have ‘Like’ buttons for each artist on their site.

More coverage at Read Write Web and Future of Media.

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I had an email recently from the Editor of NME.com, David Moynihan, about the News Diamond in practice. I thought it was worth reprinting in full:

“You describe much of what I do for a living: I am the Editor of NME.com and work in a buzzing cross-platform environment that mirrors your theories. Now that the dust is starting to settle a bit more in digital publishing, publishers are really taking notice of websites and web staff in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

“The challenge was always convincing paper staff that we were colleagues not rivals, here to compliment and expand upon their work, rather than cannibalise or undermine it. For the first time, in 2007/08 I have print staff coming and asking me about how they can get more involved with web publishing and asking what they need to know or do. People are really starting to wake up to the exciting future of digital publishing – right across organisations like IPC (or Emap, where I was Editor of FHM.com), from the board to the staff writer. That said, as a web editor I find that the change in processes, skill sets and attitude is still much too slow. The theories abound, but the practice is much more sluggish!

“Your news diamond was fascinating as it fits closely with what we do.

“An example: The Raconteurs (Jack White of the White Stripes ‘other’ band) release a new album today, in an unusual manner. They have side-stepped the usual pormotional and marketing moves and ruch-released the album with no warning, and therefore no reviews. It almost makes journalism redundant. Fan can simply listen to the album online at legal Mp3 download sites – why do they need NME?

“Except they do, it turns out. To mark the release of the album we have done all of the following on NME.com and the traffic speaks volumes about users’ needs:

1. Daily news stories in the run up to the release, covering a number of angles from album artwork, to release details to lyrics.
2. A Photo Gallery of the band to mark the release.
3. An instant review online, written by our writers in ‘blog’ format during their first listen. The full in-depth review and a feature about the unusual method of release will be in (yep, you guessed it) NME magazine, out this week.
4. Updated our Artist page nme.com/artists/the-raconteurs.
5. Streamed the album online with our radio media player.
6. Video to go online as soon as it’s released”

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