Alex Barnett blog : semanticweb

Why OData Matters (IMHO)

alexbarnett — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:24:00 GMT

Earlier this week I was in the MIX10 crowd as Douglas Purdy announced the Open Data Protocol (it was a great presentation - summarized here).

I want to share with you why I think OData could be a very big deal…But before we go there...let's start with the basics...

What is OData? Where Did OData Come From?

To understand the history of how OData came to be, you need to understand how project "Astoria" came to be...I won't go over that again as this is already pretty well documented. ~~Astoria~~ OData has come a long way since.

In a nutshell: Today, OData builds on a few conventions, popularized by AtomPub (see OData AtomPub Format), to using REST-based data services. These services allow resources, identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and defined in an abstract data model (see OData URI Conventions, to be read and edited by web clients using simple HTTP messages (see OData Operations).

An Open Data Protocol for the Web

OData offers a standardized way for programmable data to be made available across the web and in turn allowing "consumers" of that data to rely on a set of conventions to be followed that in turn allows many interesting things to happen if widely adopted...

...And to this end:

As announced, OData has been released by Microsoft under the Open Specification Promise (OSP) "to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations" . Since then, the W3C has invited the OData team to Bring OData to a W3C Incubator (I haven't seen a public response yet but I urge the team to do so.).
OData is not a Microsoft-only thing and it won’t succeed if it is. The originating philosophy was about transparency in the design process, with an Open end-point as the goal - not a .NET lock-in play (“agree on standards and compete on implementation”). This approach has already yielded an initial set of clients, servers, services, and tools. Today, a number of OData SDKs and libraries are available for .NET, Java, PHP, iPhone (Objective-C) and more – and there’ll be more coming.
There is a small but growing ecosystem of non-Microsoft "producers" and "consumers" - (where OData "producers" include Netflix’s catalog as OData and the VanGuide (a social map of Vancouver Open Data) and Public data from the city of Edmonton as OData) and OData “consumers” - standard web browsers, RIA "data explorers" – such as Sesame OData Browser, and the client libraries mentioned above – p.s. somebody build a javascript-only data browser please!)

Where can OData take us?

The clue is in the OData icon (next to the RSS feed icon. Can you see the similarities?

The big idea here is that in the same way we have the "RSS" feed icon, we'll get used to seeing the "OData" icon on commercial and non-commercial websites everywhere (especially for government-related data). So in the same way you know today that the RSS icon means "get an XML feed for this content", the "OData" icon means "get this web data" - you'll know (and your client will know) what to expect in terms of how to read in, and navigate through and query structured web data sets - and in many cases write against them - using a common syntax.

Q: Right, But So What?

A1: Open Government OData. From Open Government Data Principles

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

That’s great, but it needs to be practicable…And number 5 of the 8 Principles of Open Government Data sensibly states that the data should be (via David Eaves):

5. Machine processable

Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

It'll be down to each government agency (and local government) as to how they decide to implement this principle, but wouldn't it be great if they agreed to a standard (and a powerfully simple, web-oriented one at that)? This is what Jon Udell concluded here:

"The open data movement, in government and elsewhere, aims to help people engage with and participate in processes represented by the data. When you publish data in a fully articulated way, you build a framework for engagement, a trellis for participation. This is a huge opportunity, and it’s what most excites me about OData"

A2: To ODatarize your data is to RESTify your data.

As more data-oriented web APIs come online, each team responsible for the design of each web API is confronted by the same kinds of questions, and each team answers these in their own particular way. Increasingly, “RESTful” is a design goal of web APIs. Great…but what does that mean? How do you expose the data, the relationships between the entities inside the model, and what should the querying syntax look like? Unfortunately, there are as many answers to these questions as there are RESTful web APIs. And there needn’t be.

For to ODatarize your data is to RESTify your data. Do spend the time at the value layer - figure out the way your developers / consumers want to see the data and expose it that way. Do make it easy for devs / consumers to learn / navigate about the data and use it. Do not make them learn about the unique idiosyncrasies you’ve built into your API (or those that leak out of your originating store) :-)

From a developer’s standpoint, OData is ultimately about productivity.

For the OData “Production Developer”: Point at your data store – define your entity model and map it to the data model you already have (so your developers consume / program against the data that makes most sense to them – effectively ORM’ing) and expose as an OData service, inheriting: all the REST characteristics; entity relationship self-discovery; and querying goodness.
For the OData “Consuming Developer”: If you know the web API is OData…great! Pick up a client library, get to the API end-point (data.foo.org/blah.svc). Point and Shoot: Traverse the data model, query it (and bookmark as needed – it’s a URI)…play!

(see links at the bottom of this post to technical content that provides details on all this)

A3: Since the announcement, I’ve seen quite a bit of excitement around the web (especially Twitter) by developers who see the potential here…there is plenty of experimentation going on. At Intuit, my team is also experimenting with ODatarizing some of our data services, exploring how it might be applied across a number of our cloud based data services. And when our team’s architect Tweets that “Looks like #odata is going to be a good fit for our data services”, I know there’s something interesting going on here…

So I encourage you to find out more about OData and get involved.

More Resources

An easy way to set up an OData feed from your SQL Azure database - Stephen Forte
OData interoperability with .NET, Java, PHP, iPhone and more - MSFT Interop team
Microsoft, Bring OData to a W3C Incubator - W3C blog -
Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing OData Services-4-ria-services-ready-for-business-exposing-odata-services.aspx - Brad Abrams (MSFT)
Open Data for the Open Web - Douglas Purdy (MSFT)
Producing and consuming OData feeds: An end-to-end example - Jon Udell (MSFT)
OData for collaborative sense-making - Jon Udell
The three laws of open government data – David Eaves
8 Open Government Data Principles
Open Data Protocol (OData) with Pablo Castro - Hanselminutes podcast interview with Pablo Castro (MSFT – Architect for OData)
OData, a RESTful contender for your API - Andy Thompson
Announcing Sesame Data Browser - Fabrice Marguerie
Retrieving Data with the OData SDK for PHP - Brian Swann
Got SQL Azure? Then you've got OData - OData blog
Implementing only certain aspects of OData-only-certain-aspects-of-odata.aspx - Pablo Castro
Every SharePoint 2010 server is a Data Services server - Pablo Castro
Microsoft Creates New OData.org Website for Open Data Protocol – CMS Wire
Microsoft delivers updates on OData, Houston, Dallas - ZDNet
Timeline of Project Astoria - Pablo Castro
How ADO.NET Data Services came to be (formerly known as Project Astoria) - Alex Barnett
previous Astoria / OData posts - Alex Barnett

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

The Expanding Digital Universe

alexbarnett — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:38:00 GMT

IDC and EMC have released a new study today - 'The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010'. (press release here).

It's fascinating stuff. The research follows previous work conducted at the University of California, Berkeley (I've blooged this previously here). The methodology used for the IDC/EMC study varied from the Berkeley study in that Berkeley study examined the creation of original information (not including copies) and estimated how much digital information that would represent if all of it were converted to digital format (think: total amount of information we create). The IDC/EMC study is a forecast for devices that create or capture digital information – PCs, digital cameras, servers, sensors, etc. – and estimates the total number of megabytes they capture or produce in a year (think: actual and forecasted size of the digitial universe).

So on to the interesting tidbits from the IDC/EMC study:

Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes*, a compound annual growth rate of 57%.
While nearly 70% of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85% of the information.
Images, captured by more than 1 billion devices in the world, from digital cameras and camera phones to medical scanners and security cameras, comprise the largest component of the digital universe.
The number of images captured on consumer digital still cameras in 2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide, while the number of images captured on cell phones hit almost 100 billion. IDC is forecasting the capture of more than 500 billion images by 2010
The number of e-mail mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to nearly 1.6 billion in 2006. During the same period, the number of e-mails sent grew three times faster than the number of people e-mailing; in 2006 just the e-mail traffic from one person to another – i.e., excluding spam – accounted for 6 exabytes.
Unstructured Data – Over 95% of the digital universe is unstructured data. In organizations, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of all information.

The report says: "DC believes that over time it will become easier to deal with unstructured data as (1) more and more metadata is added to unstructured data, (2) structure is added to unstructured data, and (3) access systems provide structured views of both structured and unstructured data."
Interestingly, the study refers to the Semantic Web as a research area to follow regarding this topic.

Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day
Wal-Mart - reputed to have the largest database of customer transactions in the world In 2000, that database was reported to be 110 terabytes, with recordings and storage of information on tens of millions of transactions a day. By 2004, it was reported to be half a petabyte

So if the digital universe is expanding exponentially - and it looks like 'we' are the ones generating most of it (and consuming it) - how are we going to cope with the ever increasing amount of information?

----

*In case you're wondering, an exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 10¹⁸ bytes - there 1024 petabytes in an exabyte or 1,073,741,824 gigabytes in an exabyte. To give you an idea of what this means, five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.

Hyperdata, interoperable data web and other loosely related concepts

alexbarnett — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:12:00 GMT

Apologies in advance. I'm attempting to couple loosely related threads here...I have no conclusion.

Leigh Dobbs originally published Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF and REST for XTech 2005, where he analysed a sample of eight APIs (including the usual suspects - del.icio.us, Last.fm and Upcoming).

Dobbs speculated as to why those services lacked 'hypermedia' support.

Hypermedia: links and pointers to other resouces that are included in a service response to allow further discovery and interaction of those other resources. Or, to paraphrase Danny Ayers, 'Hypermedia should be hyperdata and Hyperdata is 'the Semanitc Web'.

Back to Dobbs (my bold):

"Lack of linking can be attributed to three factors. Firstly, discussion of the REST style have, to date, been largely centred on correct use of HTTP rather than the additional benefits that acrue from use of hypermedia. Secondly, the RPC style that the majority of the services follow, promotes a view of the API as a series of method calls, rather than endpoints within an hypertext of data. Thirdly, the use of API keys prohibits free publishing of links, as given URL is only suitable for use by a single application, the one to which the key was assigned."

Mike Dierken (a 'Senior Troublemaker') last week provided another reason why the desired 'hypermedia' (or 'hyperdata') support might be missing from those services analysed by Dobbs...again, my bold:

"This review notes that nearly all services do not use hypermedia which I think is unfortunate but understandable. I've always had a problem resolving the desire to be flexible in allowing the internal data identifiers to be used in many situations and the desire to be trivally easy for clients to access other resources by simply using links - the mashup problem. One issue I have is that the server-side software that generates the representation might not know all the possible resources made available by sibling services. Think of a US postal zip-code - if you have a service that provides weather based on zip code, should that representation also be responsible for linking to all other services - either provided by your system or some other server - that could potentially take in a zip-code? My approach is to return both direct links to known resources (tagged appropriately) as well as the short-form of the identifier, the plain zip-code for example. Microformats sort of do this, but it's a style that isn't well applied by data services."

I'll give Danny the final word (for this post at least ;-) on Hyperdata:

"I'm still convinced that working at the syntax/grammar level without any common data model/language (i.e. semantics) is fundamentally flawed when it comes to global interop. On the web interop starts with URIs for ~~concepts &~~ resources and their relations, not angle brackets. [PS. reworded - amounts to the same, but sounds less abstract]"

More <loosely> related reading:

Semantic Web & Data Integration by Kingsley Idehen
Network-Oriented Architecture and Perfect Programming by Jason Kolb
Every webservice is an island and Understanding the Future of Data: Data 2.0 by Alex James (also see Data 2.0, a response by Danny Ayers to Alex James' post)

Microformats Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:26:00 GMT

Microformats Podcast

Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats...

Joining me are Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

As usual, show notes and link to download below.

Enjoy.

Background

Last week I met with Tantek Çelik and the Mix06 event in Las Vegas where he, Marc Canter and Joshua Allen organized a Structured Blogging and Microformats 'birds of a feather' non-official event after the main sessions were over.

Tantek and I met up the next day and agreed we should get a podcast together on the topic of microformats. I asked him to invite a couple of others along for the call and he arranged for Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare to were kind enough to join us, two people who have also been intimately involved with the development of this exciting new area of microformats.

The Guests

Tantek Çelik is CTO at Technorati. Prior to his current role, Tantek was representative to the W3C for Microsoft where he also helped lead the development of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. He also spent four year at Apple and has been instrumental (along with others) in making microformats what is today.

Dan Connolly is Technical Staff at W3C, where he edited the HTML 2.0 specification with Tim Berners-Lee, was chair of the W3C Working Group that produced HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 and collaborated with Jon Bosak to form the W3C XML Working Group and produce the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation. Dan is also very involved with the W3C's Semantic Web initiatives (RDF, OWL and SPARQL). Dan blogs too.

Rohit Khare is Director of CommerceNet Labs, a non-profit investigating and promoting decentralized electronic commerce. Rohit started KnowNow in 2000 after working at the W3C during the 90's and is today working with the microformats folks as part of his work at CommereNet Labs.

Huge thanks to Tantek, Dan and Rohit for their time.

So, on to the podcast (under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License)...

Download

Microformats Podcast - (51 mins, .mp3, 12mb)

Show Notes

Introduction
What are microformats and history? (5:30)
The 'we' in microformats: microformats community, wiki, mailing lists (10:30)
Why bother? What's in it for whom? What do we have to gain with microformats? (13:30)
- Less effort, more benefits
Scenarios - the soccer season (21:00)
The schema design philosophy - Microformats are based on real world examples (26:50)
The evolution of microformats (30:00)
- If there a hundred microformats, something has gone wrong
- Widely adopted Link microformats: (rel tag).
- Compound microformats: hCard implementations (sharing contact info) and hCalendar implementations (sharing schedules)
- Experimentation - Remixed microformats: hReview and Listing examples
- Making the simple things easy
Interop with other formats (34:00)
Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard demo (screencasts) and microformats - the cut and paste (semantic) web (37:00)
- Microformats-REST
- Pasting 'live' and RSS-enabled network pipe system
- Tantek's Updates - Live syndication and packaging of data formats
Getting the semantic web. What does it mean? What does it enable? (46:00)
- Microformats - an onramp onto the semantic web future
Final thoughts (48:30)
End (51:00)

Find out more about microformats:

microformats community and wiki
join the microformats mailing lists

Tags: microformats, semantic-web, technology, web, podcast, web 2.0

Reading Lists and OPML Podcast

admin — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 19:33:00 GMT

Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators.

I think this space is getting interesting, so does Joshua Porter. So we thought we'd invite two people who've been giving plenty of thought to this area, Danny Ayers (I can spell his surname correctly these days) and Adam Green to join us for a podcast on the topic (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb) . We also invite James Corbett, who's been doing a great deal with Readings Lists and Feed Grazing, but unfortunately could not join us.

I've been following Danny Ayers' blog (Raw) for some time. Danny is a Semantic Web developer and technical author and co-author of Beginning RSS and ATOM Programming (which you'll find at practically every bookstore that has a Computers / Software section). We touched on the Semantic Web in the podcast.

Adam Green started programming in 1980, is co-founder and CTO at Andover.Net (later acquired by VA Linux in 2000 - hey Adam, buy me a beer...;-) and now a full time technical blogger at Darwinian Web. Thanks to Danny and Adam for their time today.

As usual, notes and links to related stuff below. Enjoy.

Reading Lists (OPML) podcast : Danny Ayers and Adam Green with Joshua Porter and Alex Barnett

download (.mp3 43 mins, 11mb)

.Notes:

What are Reading Lists?
Why are we getting excited about Reading Lists (04:23)
Dynamic Reading Lists (06:50)
Feed Grazing and River of Feeds model (08:30)
Danny on OPML - here under false pretences
Feed Readers as Data Browsers (12;20)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing based on Attention data - Attention intersection has to come soon (14:15)
Dynamic Reading Lists and Grazing Lists are the same thing (but different) (16:35)
Hierarchies, feed lists in RDF and the Semantic Web (Let's re-invent Gopher!) (18:50)
OPML Sampling: J Wynia's OPML Sampler (23:30)
Reading Lists as programmed content by others - Top 10 Sources (25:00??)
Dynamic Reading Lists as Attention-based recommendation system (27:30)
The Web as a data web, Semantic Web
RSS readers/aggregators as Semantic Data Web browser (SPARQL / RDF) (33:00)
OPML, RSS, Reading Lists and simplicity (35:30)
Where's the Semantic Web Demo? (37:30)
Summing up (41:00)
Bonus links: It's going to be a big year for OPML and It's going to be a big year for HTML.
End (45:30)

(I didn't cut the bit at the end of the session as I got a chance to ask Danny about Italy and Derbyshire - these two places rarely mentioned in the same sentence so I thought I'd keep for posterity ;-)

Update: Joshua has blogged it.

Tags: RSS, OPML, Reading Lists, Semantic Web, RDF, Attention, Web 2.0, podcast, web, tech

Structured Blogging Podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:51:00 GMT

You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy.

So Joshua Porter and I thought we'd give Marc Canter and Joe Reger a chance to respond to some of the criticisms and further explain what all this Structured Blogging was about in this podcast. (Part 1 notes and link below, Part 2 tomorrow).

About our guests: Marc Canter is CEO of Broadband Mechanics. Marc co-founded MacroMind in 1984 that later became Macromedia (now merged with Adobe) and also co-founder of Ourmedia.org. Joe Reger started Reger.com a datablogging service in 2003.

I was great fun to do - Marc has a 'tell it as it is' style - not shy in the slightest(!) - thanks to Marc and Joe for their time today. I learnt a great deal more by talking to them and challenging them with some of the quotes from posts that criticized the Structured Blogging idea. From speaking to Marc and Joe today I'd say there are some misunderstandings 'out there' about the SB idea, so I hope the critics at least hear these responses in the podcast and look forward to their responses.

Marc Canter (pic courtesy of Robert Scoble)

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Part 1 (.mp3, 37 minutes, 35mb)

(note: 'bah!...'technical challenges' have forced me to do a fair amount of post editing - the recording got insanely out of sync, which meant everybody was fine to hear except for me, so I've had to delete most of what I said / asked (porbably a good thing ;-), but hopefully it all flows ok...have been v.careful to ensure the necessary editing did not change any 'meaning')

Intro: News of Structured Blogging
What are the goals of Structured Blogging? (04:45)
A new era of blogging (06:20)
Sébastien Paquet's 'Towards structured blogging', 2003 (08:30)
Anil Dash's 'Introducing the Microcontent Client' 2002 (09:00)
PubSub's structured blogging initiative (10:10)
Response to quote from Paul Kedrosky's post, 'Structured Blogging will Flop' (13:30):
"It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:
The intelligence belongs in the network and in the algorithms"
Top 10 reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed (15:10)
Those damn capitalists! (20:10)
20:45 random call
We're talking about tens of millions of people. 23:00
Respond to quote from Greg Yardley's post, 'Structured Blogging as Web 2.0 Colonialism' (23:45)
"In my more pessimistic moments, I suspect that the omission of a payment mechanism is deliberate, and that the biggest proponents of Structured Blogging are just looking for new ways to aggregate a lot of content, use it to build up a valuable userbase, and sell, generating nothing for us-plain-folks but ‘a bigger megaphone."
Structured Blogging is a compatibility box (25:45)
Microcontent description (MCD) (27:00)
Standards innovation (27:50)
Structured Blogging's future: a dynamic web service: (29:00)
SB Spam and the Identity Gang (32:40)

Tags: structured blogging, microformats, semantic web, Blogging, Web2.0, RSSWeb2.0, RSS, Web2.0, RSS