It was quite definitely a full house of journalists, developers and assorted newsish techy types at the PA building in Victoria, where the Hacks/Hackers London meetup and the London Semantic Web Group combined to present a new metadata standard for news. Here's how the event was covered on Twitter.

We started with the introductions...

The event was run by the IPTC, which has developed technical standards for exchanging news formats since 1965.

The first speaker was Andreas Gebhard (@agebhard) of Getty Images, who spoke about the history of the IPTC. It was difficult to sum up his presentation smoothly, as he covered decades of history and looked at how the IPTC had developed standards for text, photo and multimedia exchanges.

Edit - an early draft of his slides is online here.

Stuart Myles (@smyles) of Associated Press was the second speaker, with a presentation aimed at encouraging news organisations large and small to adopt the rNews standard. He started by setting out the problems rNews is trying to solve, and then gave seven ideas for how the standard could be used.

Last to speak was Evan Sandhaus (@kansandhaus) of the New York Times, who gave us an incredibly fast-paced overview of the problems with the current structure of news sites, the nature of RDF and what on earth rNews actually does.

Here's an early draft of his presentation, and here's an introduction to rNews that covers many of his lessons - and practical-minded folks might want to start with the IPTC dev site's tutorials to help you get started.