Inspirational Technology

Earlier this week a new update to the Structured Blogging plugins was released. This release finally includes support in the PHP plugin for the MC Ping service that we developed at Grid7 a few months back. MC Ping is a notification service for microcontent, the intention is for it to act as a connection point between people posting microcontent and services that consume that microcontent. The data flowing through it is just a trickle right now, but should pick up as more people update to the new plugins. MC Ping includes support for Microformats as well as the Structured Blogging specific microcontent types.

From my perspective, work on Structured Blogging has slowed considerably. I had big plans for it and we were working on a number of projects at Grid7 that were being built upon the concept. Unfortunately, while I am still optimistic that there will eventually be real value in the publishing of Microcontent, we had to conclude that we were way ahead of the game in trying to base parts of our business upon it. That, coupled with our tremendous excitement about our JumpBox project has led us to redirect our energies. That’s bad for Structured Blogging, but for Grid7 it’s a very important opportunity. JumpBox is truly exciting and we’ve been heads down on it now for about six weeks. This has once again resulted in me losing blogging momentum, but we’re doing lots of interesting stuff so hopefully I’ll be able to start writing about some of it again very soon. One interesting thing is that for the first time in probably eight years I’m working on a project that has absolutely nothing to do with XML. And the really strange thing is that this is the first time I’ve even thought about that.