OK - so that last post was pretty incoherent. People rely upon me to explain to them what’s going on. I’m their ‘Silicon Valley insider reporter’ on all things microcontent, DLA and coolio-icious.

So it’s incumbant upon me to go beyond insider enthusiastic waxings, and let folks see the anatomy of a standard - happening right in front of their faces.

Call it evolution or product development, what Matt started at Yahoo - can easily be adapted and picked up by an entire industry.

So let me explain what Yahoo announced today, what it has to do with Google Base and SixApart’s Comet and the world of microcontent today.

1. The problem being solved by Matt’s Social Media Tools - is currently solving a problem they have within Yahoo. Or at least, at first glance it’s ONLY solving Yahoo’s problems. You see they have all sorts of content around Yahoo and if one wanted to blog about something, wouldn’t it be coolio if there was a ‘Blog This’ button right next to the content and if one clicked on that button it would get sent - auto-magically to one’s Y! 360’s blog?

2. So Yahoo’s management approves Matt’s budget, supports his plans and goals and let’s him “do his thing”.

3. But Matt is being subversive. He’s plotting. He’s thinking “The NEW Yahoo is open. How can I make a significant impact for not just Yahoo, but the entire world, by leveraging problems Yahoo has itself - internally - which I can then solve external challanges - as well?”

4. So Matt wraps his arms around the whole chiclet thing. They’re everywhere, they’re an annoyanace and Yahoo has so many properties, standards and pieces of their puzzle that it almost requires that it standardize on chiclets - just for it’s own sanity.

5. So Matt starts with ‘Save this’, ‘Blog This’ and ‘Print this’. Three seperate problems, one fail swoop answer. Standardize the chiclets. Give the Javscript away and send them all to Yahoo properties.

6. But wait a minute? Why would I wanna send all these posts to my Y! 360 blog? I mean come - are you kidding?

7. But Matt is not that stupid. He knows most people will say that - and he knows that the ONLY way Yahoo (and his boss Jeff Weiner) would allow and pay him to do anything is if it helps out Yahoo - first. If it also can help out others along the way or in an expanded form - then coolio.

8. So what we’re gonna do is “PRAY TO THE LORD OF TECHNOLOGY that Matt can conivince his bosses to expand the ‘Blog This’ button to support the RedirectThis web service - so instead of the Blog This button ONLY going to Y! 360 blogs, they can also go ANYWHERE the end-user specifies.

9. And that would make it a coolio new standard that Matt enabled - Yahoo gets credit for (along with Lucas Gonze and Broadband Mechnaoics) and everyone is happy.

Ever after.

OK - but wait!

What does this have to do with GoingOn, 6A’s Comet, Google Base or DLAs in general = you ask?

Well I’m glad you did and I’m glad you’re givng me this opportunity to connect the dots.

First off - if you go to RedirectThis.com - you’ll see that we’re calling our chiclet - Post This. Whatever.

Who cares what it’s called right?

Who cares if it’s called microformats, Structured Blogging, Google Base or Comet. It’s still structured content and that’s a good thing. So we’re hoping to ‘give’ RedirectThis to Yahoo and let them run with it.

RdirectThis keeps the integrity of the structured post, so that if it IS sent to a new kind of tool that can understand what an event is, or a review (like 6A’s Comet or our GoingOn Network) - it’ll maintain the integrity of the structured content and NOT slam it into one giant text field.

OK - so that’s one thing that RedirectThis does - that Matt’s standard doesn’t necessarily do - yet. Can you blame them? It’s OUR job to out ahead of the curve and Yahoo’s job to take this technology and move it down the pyramid.

Y! 360 HAS reviews in it - so I’ll predict that Randy Farmer and company will quickly get their Reviews to support Blog This - but only this time - maintain the integrity of the Yahoo Movie Review - for instance or a Yahoo Calendar event when it gets sent to the Yahoo blog tool.

That will show Google that they’re not the only game in town who can play microcontent.

And that then means that others will follow - not only SixApart or Google, but also an entire industry of folks gobbling up and consumng micro-content. Everything we do will include RedirectThis. It’s a key element in the DLA architecture.

So the RedirectThis service can be a key glue element which could unite disparate end-users who have a disperate tools together - by enabling each end-user to speciify which tool they want their ‘Blog This’ content sent to - and it’s all done with one open web service.

Does that make sense?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 10:16 pm 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.