Lazyness, messiness and structure
I’m happy to see Stowe use intelligent,well thought out reasoning in being skeptical about Structured Blogging.
It makes allot more sense than Paul Kedrovsky’s almost hysterical rantings. I guess Paul has an investment in some company that claims they can automate ‘finding structure meaning’ in content - so having humans index their own content doesn’t help them.
Whether or not someone is going to ‘bother’ to attach even the simplest description of what they’re posting - the issues are still there. We need to make sure that variants and different flavors of the same dam thing - work together.
What happens sociologically, technically or economically - is up to God - or whoever it is that dictates how humans work and react to each other. No amount of blogger hysterics, predictions and acclamations will matter.
Sure people are lazy - absolutely. But they also get into talking aboiut teh movie they just saw, teh book they just read or the local hair ddresser. So that’s why I say 10 times more people will write reviews - then will ever blog. Blogging is for intelligentsia - who actually have something to say and who try and say it. That’s not what normal humans are like.
They got other things to worry about. But they DO want their word heard and posting into this dark empty pit of the Long Tail is pretty lonely. So if they ‘index’ or ‘describe’ what it is they’re doing or god forbid route their content to specific places where it’s more likely to get read - then all the better.
I don’t see how you can argue against that.
Stop pontificating and get on with investing money in small Web 2.0 companies - Paul.
Heh. Something oddly ironic about saying people will gladly fill in extra metadata fields to make posts usable in other contexts, while leaving every post on this blog in the “Uncategorized” default category
Heh. Something oddly ironic about saying people will gladly fill in extra metadata fields to make posts usable in other contexts, while leaving every post on this blog in the “Uncategorized” default category
Heh. Something oddly ironic about saying people will gladly fill in extra metadata fields to make posts usable in other contexts, while leaving every post on this blog in the “Uncategorized” default category
Stowe’s reasoning may not be as well thought out as you suggest. At times, he really seems to be reaching for reasons not to like SB. For instance, he writes: “Personally, I think it will fail because people don’t want their music review to look like everybody else’s…”
Well, it is unquestionable that not everyone will want their content to look like everyone else’s. That would be *very* boring. This is precisely why we’ve seen so many people modify the output templates used by the Structured Blogging extensions. They adjust the templates to conform to the styles of their own blogs. But, what is curious is that even though many folk have customized the visual appearance generated by the SB templates, we don’t see as many people changing the data structures used by the extensions under the cover. Clearly, what we’re seeing is presentation matters much more to people than data encoding formats do… Many people are skilled enough to change the templates while recognizing that there is value in keeping the underlying data structures standardized. This is one of the reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed. It is possible for many people to be creative in presentation while still keeping enough commonality in data storage so that the machines can provide common services.
bob wyman
Stowe’s reasoning may not be as well thought out as you suggest. At times, he really seems to be reaching for reasons not to like SB. For instance, he writes: “Personally, I think it will fail because people don’t want their music review to look like everybody else’s…”
Well, it is unquestionable that not everyone will want their content to look like everyone else’s. That would be *very* boring. This is precisely why we’ve seen so many people modify the output templates used by the Structured Blogging extensions. They adjust the templates to conform to the styles of their own blogs. But, what is curious is that even though many folk have customized the visual appearance generated by the SB templates, we don’t see as many people changing the data structures used by the extensions under the cover. Clearly, what we’re seeing is presentation matters much more to people than data encoding formats do… Many people are skilled enough to change the templates while recognizing that there is value in keeping the underlying data structures standardized. This is one of the reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed. It is possible for many people to be creative in presentation while still keeping enough commonality in data storage so that the machines can provide common services.
bob wyman
Stowe’s reasoning may not be as well thought out as you suggest. At times, he really seems to be reaching for reasons not to like SB. For instance, he writes: “Personally, I think it will fail because people don’t want their music review to look like everybody else’s…”
Well, it is unquestionable that not everyone will want their content to look like everyone else’s. That would be *very* boring. This is precisely why we’ve seen so many people modify the output templates used by the Structured Blogging extensions. They adjust the templates to conform to the styles of their own blogs. But, what is curious is that even though many folk have customized the visual appearance generated by the SB templates, we don’t see as many people changing the data structures used by the extensions under the cover. Clearly, what we’re seeing is presentation matters much more to people than data encoding formats do… Many people are skilled enough to change the templates while recognizing that there is value in keeping the underlying data structures standardized. This is one of the reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed. It is possible for many people to be creative in presentation while still keeping enough commonality in data storage so that the machines can provide common services.
bob wyman
I don’t see why the “people are lazy” argument is one AGAINST SB. If anything, I think it’s a resounding argument for it.
Without Structured Blogging, if I want to write a book review, I:
1.) Go to Amazon/search for the book I want to review.
2.) Download the book cover art and save the URL/ISBN#.
3.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post.
4.) Format the book’s title and author within the post, to make it clear what’s what.
5.) Upload/insert the saved book cover art.
6.) Write my review.
7.) Publish.
With Structured Blogging, I go to write a book review, and all I do is:
1.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post > Review > Book
2.) Enter the book title in the “Book Title” field and hit “Lookup”. (a sweet DHTML/AJAX dropdown appears with a list of books close to the title you input, and artwork for each)
3.) Choose the book from the list and hit select. (the SB fields for author, title, amazon isbn#, pages, and any other data available from Amazon are populated automatically.
4.) Write my review.
5.) Publish.
Now, how is the first route the one that the lazy person is going to take?
I don’t see why the “people are lazy” argument is one AGAINST SB. If anything, I think it’s a resounding argument for it.
Without Structured Blogging, if I want to write a book review, I:
1.) Go to Amazon/search for the book I want to review.
2.) Download the book cover art and save the URL/ISBN#.
3.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post.
4.) Format the book’s title and author within the post, to make it clear what’s what.
5.) Upload/insert the saved book cover art.
6.) Write my review.
7.) Publish.
With Structured Blogging, I go to write a book review, and all I do is:
1.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post > Review > Book
2.) Enter the book title in the “Book Title” field and hit “Lookup”. (a sweet DHTML/AJAX dropdown appears with a list of books close to the title you input, and artwork for each)
3.) Choose the book from the list and hit select. (the SB fields for author, title, amazon isbn#, pages, and any other data available from Amazon are populated automatically.
4.) Write my review.
5.) Publish.
Now, how is the first route the one that the lazy person is going to take?
I don’t see why the “people are lazy” argument is one AGAINST SB. If anything, I think it’s a resounding argument for it.
Without Structured Blogging, if I want to write a book review, I:
1.) Go to Amazon/search for the book I want to review.
2.) Download the book cover art and save the URL/ISBN#.
3.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post.
4.) Format the book’s title and author within the post, to make it clear what’s what.
5.) Upload/insert the saved book cover art.
6.) Write my review.
7.) Publish.
With Structured Blogging, I go to write a book review, and all I do is:
1.) Go to my blog interface & click Write Post > Review > Book
2.) Enter the book title in the “Book Title” field and hit “Lookup”. (a sweet DHTML/AJAX dropdown appears with a list of books close to the title you input, and artwork for each)
3.) Choose the book from the list and hit select. (the SB fields for author, title, amazon isbn#, pages, and any other data available from Amazon are populated automatically.
4.) Write my review.
5.) Publish.
Now, how is the first route the one that the lazy person is going to take?