A CNN technique: using the first paragraph for RSS summaries

Shortening RSS descriptions to lead sentences. I'm really enjoying my ability to scan a lot of sources in my Radio news aggregator. [Jon's Radio]

Jon Udell writes about how he hacked the code that writes his RSS file to include only the first sentence instead of the entire item.  He contrasts this to another approach he's seen that cuts off the description after an arbritrary number of characters.  (I've seen that one, and I don't like it.)

I'd rather have it another way.  CNN.com has a product they referred to as "Quick News."  It's a syndication product, suitable for sending out to WAP phones, airplane seatbacks, or any other place that might want short CNN headlines.  Up until early last year, the Quick News product was produced by a separate staff who re-wrote a certain number of CNN.com stories into this shorter format.  This was deemed as not the most efficient use of staff, so instead they sought to modify the CNN.com internally-built CMS tools to take the first paragraph and turn that into a quick news story.   (They also had to train staff to make sure the first 'graph was something that could be syndicated.) 

I think that approach would work very well here.  If you want a single sentence as your description, great; if you need a couple of sentences, that would work, too.