Comments on: Standards in microcontent publishing

by: InfoTangle :: Sayonara Super-Size – It’s Bite-Sized on the Web :: June :: 2006

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:33:13 +0000

[...] “Microcontent“. Wikipedia. (Viewed on 6/8/06) “Microformats“. Wikipedia. (Viewed on 6/8/06) Arrington, Michael. “TagWorld Widgets Platform“. TechCrunch. Beisel, David. “Microchunking Doesn’t Mean Microconsumption“. Genuine VC. Brogan, Chris. “Microcontent on the Rise“. [ChrisBrogan.com]. Cashmore, Pete. “Why Online Media Should Be Free (And Why We Should Embrace the Splogosphere)“. Mashable. Celik, Tantek. “Introducting Microformats Search and Pingerati“. Technorati. E&P Staff. “Mochila Adds AP, Hearst, and Several Others to Network.” Editor & Publisher. Glaser, Mark. “YouTube CEO Hails ‘Birth of a New Clip Culture’“. MediaShift. Haque, Umair. “The New Economics of Media: Micromedia, Connected Consumption and The Snowball Effect“. (Presentation). Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab. Leene, Dr. Arnaud. “Microcontent is Everywhere!!!“. MacManus, Richard. “Microcontent Design, Part 1” Read/Write Web. MacManus, Richard. “Microcontent Aggregators: 43 Things” Read/Write Web. MacManus, Richard. “Microcontent Aggregators: Peoplefeeds” Read/Write Web. MacManus, Richard. “Microcontent Aggregators: Superglu” Read/Write Web. Menell, Bryan. “Microchunking and Learning“. Learning 2.0. Rodgers, Zachary. “Online Video: Now in Syndication“. ClickZ Network. Rubel, Steve. “YouOS Web Desktop.” Micro Persuasion. Schonfeld, Erick. “Now Serving: The Media Microchunk“. Business 2.0. Staken, Kimbro. “Standards in Microcontent Publishing“. Inspirational Technology. Wilson, Fred. “The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed)“. A VC. Winkler, Hugh. “Microcontent Three-Way Processes“. Messages Not Models. [...]

by: Danny

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:41:22 +0000

One small nit. The problem with RSS hasn’t been so much to do with standardization - at this point in time RSS 2.0 pretty well is the de facto standard. The problem is with the nature of its specification.

Arguably there was a better one (RSS 1.0), designed by a commitee no less. But irrespective of that, because of the numerous shortfalls of RSS, a significant number of syndication developers had little option but to develop a new specification, Atom. Technically, RSS itself could have been fixed, but the specification process didn’t allow for it.

I’ll add that the situation with RSS is very different to that of HTML. When HTML came along no-one really had a clue about best practices for interoperability (there wasn’t a Web). This wasn’t the case when RSS came along, best practices had emerged. But then sloppiness was rebadged as “simple” and hailed as a virtue.

by: Inspirational Technology » Blog Archive » More on RDFa

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 18:23:33 +0000

[...] This is from an email I wrote to clarify my concerns with the existence of RDFa. It was in response to an email prompted by my post on the premature creation of standards in the microcontent space. I had looked at RDFa and I agree it’s not all that complicated, in fact RDF as a basic technology isn’t really that complicated. Where RDF fails is the semantic web vision and the complexity pulled in by trying to build a globally scalable data framework. To me that’s too aggressive of an approach for real world adoption. Anyone who actually gets out in the field and works with average skill level developers will know that a disturbingly large percentage are still struggling with simple XML, let alone the ideas behind RDF. The RDF vision is great and I don’t dispute the theoretical value of it, my problem with it is born 100% from the fact that I just don’t believe it can succeed outside the realm of the above average skill level developers who are already interested in it. That’s basically been my opinion since I read the early working drafts for the RDF specs and I’ve seen nothing since then that’s allowed me to think otherwise. I’m always looking. [...]

by: Kimbro Staken

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:22:50 +0000

Yep, that’s all that matters. Once there’s enough data out there we can worry about standards. Until then that’s just premature optimization.

by: Brendan Taylor

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:40:21 +0000

Although I disagree with you about the utility of RDF (really, it’s a lot easier than it looks. why it hasn’t been picked up, I don’t know), in the end it’s not really important.

What matters is getting the machine readable data out there - once it’s marked up properly it’s comparatively trivial to convert it to whatever format you like the best.