“Ever wondered why you can’t just click on an article and blog it?” – where’s the universal “Blog This” button?

“Concerned that while microformats and micro-content standards are taking off, our existing tools will lose the structure of these ‘chunks of reviews, events, media. Etc.?” – where are the ‘reblogging tools’ that maintain the structure of microformats and micro-content?
“Tired of being forced to use only the latest tool or utility to take advantage of a new standard – wish you could use ANY tool or utility instead?” - where’s a routing service to enable me to send posts to whatever tool I chose?

Well then – you know why we created ReBlg.com – a universal “Blog This” button and routing service.

With ReBlog.com end-users will be able to click on a ‘ReBlog’ button and send a piece of micro-content or microformat to their favorite tool for editing, annotating or just plain prettying up. End-users would specify what is their favorite tool at a simple web service or in a MIME handler that they downloaded and run on their own machine.

Even though it’s been possible for years, most of today’s aggregators and tools do not support the notion of displaying a button to easily allow end-users to “Blog This” particular post or article. Sure some aggregators enable plug-ins to kludge this option, but in general most bloggers are forced to ‘cut’ the source of a post and ‘paste’ it into their favorite tool. With each tool or environment comes a different kludge or hack, with its own rules and gotchas to contend with.

And now that microformats and micro-content standards are emerging around richly structured content, isn’t this dream of ease of use slipping through our fingers?

So how would a standard to enable a universal “Blog This” button to work? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click on a ‘ReBlg’ button and decide which tool I want to send that post to – irregardless of who produces that tool? Wouldn’t it be nice that this process NOT lose the structure of the microformat or micro-content I’m clicking on – thereby keeping in tact the structure of that post?

Wouldn’t it be nice to support a system of meshing together various kinds of tools, utilities or solutions – from a wide range of vendor’s – without forcing end-users to take sides or lock them into one tool vendors camp or product?

Well that’s what ReBlg.com will do. (http://reblg.com/ )

Broadband Mechanics will be utilizing this technology in all our future micro-content publishing systems and DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) so we thought it would be useful to the entire industry as well.

Here’s how it would work:

- a tool vendor or individual page creator would:

o a) make sure that each individual micro-content or microformat posts would have their own unique permalink or anchor URL
o b) we’d provide code that would display a ‘Reblg’ button next to that post ( http://gonze.com/bbm/source.html )

- when an end-user clicks on this button, the post is sent to a router screen which sends the post (via a web service called ReBlg.com or a MIME handler that was downloaded onto the end-users machine) to their favorite tool of choice.
- The micro-content structure would be maintained, while each ‘reblog’ tool would provide whatever features that tool vendor wishes. BBM will (for instance) enable end-users to add visual wrapper or borders, annotation, tags and URLK to the post
- That’s it ( http://reblg.com/ )

ReBlg.com would enable end-users to register their favorite tool of choice so that wherever they traveled on the web, by simply clicking on the ‘ReBlg’ button – they could easily send that post to their favorite tool. If the end-user doesn’t want to rely upon our web service, then they can simply download a MIME handler to do that routing for them.

We’ll soon to be putting out a FireFox Greasemoneky script – which will automatically sense micro-formats and display the ‘ReBlg’ buttons. An ActiveX control is also in the works.

By providing a simple way for end-users to send any richly structured post to their favorite tool, the microformat and micro-content revolution can take another step towards reality.

And where are these tools which will recognize the microformats or micro-content and not lose their structure? Well BBM will be providing one and plug-ins for WordPress and Moveable Type – as well.

Final NOTE: We feel horrible about being so close to Reblog.org. They’re nice people – but we use the term reblog completely differently. Hmmmmm.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 1:28 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.