So Marc Canter announced reblg today:

Ever wondered why you cant 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.

I’m confused, but here’s my interpretation:

Reblg hopes to spur the growth of microformats on the web, by introducing a tool (or set of tools) that create an incentive to post in a structured format. Presumably Reblg will be sensitive to hCal, hReview, and the other microcontent formats currently being pushed by Technorati. I don’t see a format for your basic “blog post” but I imagine that such a thing is not too far out. Reblg’s Grease Monkey script will parse HTML and add little orange “blog this” buttons next to recognized content chunks - calendar events, etc. Users of the script and other Reblg tools will be able to click those buttons and have them route the clicked-upon content to a blogging tool of their choice.

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MARC’s first response: Hey Mike - you bascially got it right. There is a short term benefit of enabling a ‘universal routing’ service - which can apply to ANY blog post - you’re right - we’re hoping to help provide infrastructure to a key part of the micro-content pipeline - and to enable microformats and micro-content to be mixed and matched.

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The benefits to weblog writers would be:

• Faster time-to-repost. Adding a piece of microcontent to your site would be a one-click operation, presumably with an extra “are you sure?” step and some space for comments thrown in.
• Easier to find re-postable content. If Six Apart and Blogger get on-board, many sites will be publishing this easy-to-repurpose material by default.
• Faster spread of your writing. Providing standard ways to repurpose your writing means that your readers can pass it on with less muss, less fuss.

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MARC’s second response: Well there are a few other benefits.

1) It’s imperative that the structure of the microformat or micro-content be maintained. This is the ‘challange’ that RSS has put us into - services like UpComing.org enable subscription to one’s personal events, but the structure of the event is lost. That’s gotta stop. We NEED to maintain the structure of stuctured content!

2) I myself have been frustrated by not being able to simply click and have a post sent to my blogging tool. Lots of hacks and plug-ins exist - but wouldn’t it be nice to have a ‘universal’ way of inter-connecting content to an editor? This has ramifications for the future - and if you’ve been following my ideas on DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) you’d know I live, breath and sleep for this vision.

And finally 3) another key benefit that ReBlg provides - is that it enables (in a generic way) inter-connecting tools together - which are not locked into one vendor’s ‘mafia’ of compatiblity. Increasingly we’re seeing lots of great ‘islands’ of functionality - which are not stand alone applications or services. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to inter-connect all these tools together?

There are also some future benefits to some additional functionality that fits right into this - see below….

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The benefits to Reblg/Marc Canter would be:

• Marketable data. The Reblg service handles the transition between a click of the orange button and a post to your site. Each re-post would be routed through the server, along with immediate information on who’s posting what and where they’re getting it. Right now, Technorati and other similar sites get a lot of their information via trackback pings generated when a post is published. Here, Reblg gets much of this same information when a post is conceived. Holy crap!
• Copious whuffie.

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Marc’s third defensive posture…….

UM actually no. First of all - we’ll be putting out a MIME handler - so that individuals can do teh routing themselves. Secondly - we’ll open soruc eteh web service - so anybody can run one - it’s not just about us running soem ’sniffing;’ service. Thridly - for what it’s worth - we’d never do that - and we’ll pledge not to do that. And finally - we’re putting this idea out there NOT for tracking what you’re doing - but to enable connectivity that CAN’T be done today.

Going back to the islands of functionality…..

For us (as an industry) to equal Longhorn and whatever Apple comes up with - it’s imperative that we come up with techniques to implement the mesh. A mesh that inter-connects tools togfether. That’s the infrastructure we’re proposing.

I mentioned some future ideas - and one of them is a ‘universal OUTPUT routing service’. Right now ReBlg does universal INPUT into a tool, but wouldn’t it be cool to be able to ROUTE IT’s OUTPUT anywhere as well - as an open API or web service? The combination of being able to route any content to any tool AND route any output to any source - starts to mesh in ANY kind of tool, service or vendor.

Thank you for your concern - BTW - Lucas Gonze made sure that this architecture could and would include anybody (including both individuals and entities) and that we NOT do the things you fear. We do too!

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I’m not fully clear on how this beats the One Microformat To Rule Them All, the URL.

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Now I’m getting excited!: Dude - losing the start and stop times of an event or the price of a movie or the location of a hotel - is not cool. Why do we HAVE ot have unstructured data? I don’t get that? I don’t get why we have to have all text in one giant text block? T B-L really didn’t give us the final platform we need - and whatever the form of meta-data, structure or semantics that are applied - I feel REALLY STRONGLY that it’s needed. URLs are a great way to find stuff, but once you’re there - wouldn’t be cool to have some structure there - as well?

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It feels to me that a lot of blogs have had this problem licked for some time, by providing permanent links to individual content chunks. I guess it’s Marc wants to get not just the text of the linked item, but also the markup and semantic content. An item posted as an hCal event would stay that way through any number of “reblggings.”

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Yup!

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I’m not sure I agree that this is necessarily a desire shared by others, though, because I can’t piece together the first list of benefits above into any shape that would make sense for mid-stream users - people coming across reblgged posts and wanting to pass them on. hCal could be useful, if someone were to cook up an HTML-to-iCal bridge for it, but right now it’s about as useful as the rest of the semantic web.

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Check out EVDB, UpComing and a while shitload of Review sites. What happens when we can all join together? What happens when cell phones carriers provide ‘review’ buttons? What happens when event aggregators can proivide value added services - and get people into events and shows - for free?

Aggregating micro-content is gonna be HUGE! IMHO.

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One place I can see this being insanely cool would be to make the linkage information open, like Del.icio.us does. If (as a writer) I could see who has been repurposing my microcontent, it would help close the already-tight post response ego trip loop accelerated by Technorati.

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See? You’re already thinking of new usages here!

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Oh yeah:

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.

Dammit Marc, it’s a great name, think up your own! Help me understand how this use of “reblog” is different from ours.