As newspapers become less and less actually made of paper and move online, opportunities for developers are arising. One great example of this is one London-based newspaper's approach: The Guardian Open Platform. The "paper" uses this platform to open its content and resources to application developers while The Guardian embeds advertising into the free text it provides.
The platform, powered by the open source Apache Lucene server, provides developers with content and politics APIs as well as a data store. The content is also accessed three different ways: Keyless, Approved and Bespoke. Keyless access provides only the story headlines, Approved gives full and free access to content, but advertising is embedded in the body of the text and Bespoke access is free of ads, but comes with a negotiated fee.
Last week, the latest creation came from this platform, the news feed plug-in for WordPress, a new tool for bloggers to post Gaurdian content directly to their blogs.