Stowe Boyd senses that there’s a war going on between two different approaches to ‘micro-content formats’. I agree, I saw this coming - and we’re doing something about it.

Stowe interviewed both Tantek Celik and Bob Wyman at Web 2.0 and discovered the differences between Tantek’s ‘microformats’ approach and Bob’s ’structured blogging’ approach.

Well one of the messages that did NOT get out at the Web 2.0 Structured Blogging announcement - is that the code that we’re building for PubSub (the new version 2.0 of Structured Blogging) will in fact support BOTH approaches - in the same code base.

Not only those two formats, but we’re also making sure it works in Wordpress, Moveable Type and Drupal - and works with RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom and is available for pure rdf semantic web nerds as well. We’ll also provide output of these ‘micro-content’ chunks in HTML and OPML - so we should make everyone happy - right?

That’s what Canter’s Law #1 is all about.

This code base will also be expanded to work with other new forms of micro-content (beyond just Events and Reviews) to include media (audio, images and video), Lists and a couple of human oriented formats which we call ‘People Showcase’ and ‘Group Showcase’.

Turns out that a HUGE percentage of blog posts are about individual people or groups of people.

So this strategy will hopefully level the playing field andget us beyond teh format wars - so we can focus on the end-user benefits that micro-content can bring to humans.

This is what it’s all about - not format wars.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 2:10 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.