BlogMD

By Phillip Pearson
Sunday, August 25, 2002

BlogMD is an initiative started by N.Z. Bear (the Truth Laid Bear) to increase the amount of metadata provided by weblogs and to make that data easy to collect and move around.

People involved so far:

• NZ Bear
• Dean Peters
• me
• a whole heap of others on the forums

What we're going to build:

We're going to hack together several things.  First, a way of representing this metadata (perhaps some sort of HTML hackery to let you use <meta/> or <link rel/> tags to point to XML).  Next, a way of querying a server which stores aggregated metadata for a number of weblogs.  Finally, some sort of madly distributed network of servers which will store everybody's metadata and produce wildly useful information!

OK, not sure about that last one.  Anyway.  Watch the blog and see what happens ;-)

Progress so far:

The data will probably be encoded using RDF, using Dublin Core tags where possible, and some other namespace for weblog-specific things.  Movable Type's TrackBack system is a good example of how to do this inside HTML documents without confusing browsers.

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