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Kimbro Staken exploring creative use of technology and whatever else happens to seem interesting.

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links for 2006-06-30

June 29th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

links for 2006-06-24

June 23rd, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

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links for 2006-06-23

June 22nd, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

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Microformats and Structured Blogging are not competitors

June 22nd, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

It’s been an unfortunately common misconception that Structured Blogging and Microformats are competitors. Now, even Marc Canter whose company hired me to work on Structured Blogging late last year, has fallen into the trap of thinking this way when he says “However with the demise (and inevitable dissolution of PubSub) it looks like Dave Sifry’s stampeding marketing efforts have won.”. How can they win when they’re not even competeting? I’ll lay it out in simple terms here.

Structured Blogging is a Open Source project that builds TOOLs to publish microcontent including Microformats

Microformats is an open effort to build FORMATs for microcontent data.

Tools and formats are not the same thing. These projects are fully in line with each other and both efforts are necessary.

In fact, from looking through the results of the Technorati Microfomats search, next to the various Yahoo services, users of the Structured Blogging plugins are probably the biggest generators of Microformated Review data.

Why is this? It’s because the Structured Blogging plugins are a TOOL that makes it really easy to create the reviews. People aren’t using the tool because they want to publish structured data, even I don’t really use it for that reason, they use it because it makes writing reviews easier. A side effect of that is that the review gets published in the hReview Microformat as well as the Structured Blogging XML format.

Now I hear you say, but why the other format? There are a number of reasons the XML format still needs to exist.

  1. There aren’t yet Microformats for every type of data that people want to publish.
  2. The Microformats that do exist often don’t cover the full range of data that the tool needs to track.
  3. There is data that needs to be tracked, but should not have a visible presence on the page.
  4. The tool uses the format internally for all editing operations because of the first item above and because it’s a lot easier to work with the XML using XML tools like XPath, than it is to deal with the Microformatted data.
  5. Historical - The first version of the Structured Blogging plugins published only that XML block and the requirements when we built the new version dictated that we maintain the external publication of the data in the same manner. Those requirements were dictated by PubSub, more on this later.

Those formats are then published to the world for most of the same reasons. Now however, in the cases where there is an existing Microformat it will be used as well. So currently you can use the Structured Blogging tools to generate hReview, hCalendar, hCard, XOXO, rel-tag and rel-license Microformatted data and it is my explicit goal to continue to use Microformats where ever they fit. So again how can we be competing when a big focus of our efforts revolves around publishing Microformatted data?

Over time as more Microformats emerge we’ll continue to add support until the time where everything we want to do has an associated Microformat. At that point we’ll probably still have an associated XML format for each content type because of the internal needs of the tool, but whether those formats are used widely outside the tool is an open question and really not relevant in looking at things today.

Marc Canter also seems to see the death of PubSub as the death of Structured Blogging as well. Now here’s what Marc really doesn’t get, Structured Blogging is supposed to be an Open Source project. And one of the great things about Open Source projects is that they can survive the death of any supposed backing companies. And that’s especially true when the backing companies aren’t actually doing any of the development work which was the case with PubSub.

In this case I see the death of PubSub as a good thing. PubSub and Technorati were competitors and even though the Structured Blogging effort isn’t a competitor to Microformats, many people still extended the PubSub/Technorati competition to the Structured Blogging/Microformats efforts. At one point in time that may have even been true, but now, as I’ve tried to communicate here, it no longer is. Personally, I’m happy to see PubSub out of the picture. Now we can refocus the Structured Blogging effort on being truly open and focused around building really cool tools to create fun applications of Microcontent. We can also be free to fix some of the more controversial elements of the tools, deepen the support of Microformats and bring the concept of microcontent publishing into many other systems.

So contrary to what Marc says I don’t see the death of PubSub as any kind of loss for the Structured Blogging effort, in fact I see it as an opportunity for a new beginning.


Posted in General, XML, Microcontent, Microformats, Structured Blogging | 8 Comments »

links for 2006-06-22

June 21st, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

links for 2006-06-21

June 20th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

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links for 2006-06-20

June 19th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

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Album of the week - Zero 7 - Simple Things

June 19th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

Artist: Zero 7

Album: Simple Things

Rating: 5 out of 5

Media: CD

Genre: Downtempo

Year: 2001

Label: Palm Pictures

Favorite songs

  • Distractions
  • In the waiting line
  • I have seen

This album makes Album of the Week because Zero 7 just released their new album “The Garden”. The new album makes it clear how brilliant Simple Things really was. I plan to write a review of the The Garden as soon as I can figure out how I really feel about it. This is about Simple Things though, and there I can say, without hesitation, that it’s a brilliant piece of downtempo electronica.

Smooth, flowing, chill are all ways you can describe this album. It’s a great blend of electronic textures with real instruments and smooth vocals and makes great accompaniment while you’re working. The beats and vibe drives the music forward without being too distracting and overall just contributes to that feeling of chill that goes so well when writing code.

There isn’t a bad song on this album, but the song that initially hooked me was Distractions. For some reason that song just grabbed me and never let go. According to iTunes I’ve played that song 95 times and I love it just as much now as I did the first time I heard it. Oh yeah, the least played song on this album has 82 plays. Considering I have 30,847 songs in my iTunes library that’s a pretty good indication of just how good this album is. Highly recommended.

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Posted in Music | No Comments »

links for 2006-06-19

June 18th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

Posted in General | No Comments »

Gridcon 2006

June 17th, 2006 by Kimbro Staken

Just got back from Gridcon 2006. Basically we took off to a cabin outside Flagstaff Arizona for a few days to work and think about what we’re doing with Grid7. The big topic of the trip, should we move? This year calling it Gridcon 2006 was an inside joke, but we’re already looking forward to Gridcon 2007 which might just be something different.


Posted in Grid7 | 1 Comment »

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© 2006 Kimbro Staken