In "Towards structured blogging" I wrote about how blogging tools ought
to evolve in a way that allows structured data - such as product reviews - to creep in. Stefan Smalla had similar thoughts around the same time. Marc,
ever the true believer in the value of extensions to the blogging
paradigm, has been pushing those ideas as hard as he could for quite
some time.
Assuming people increasingly care about controlling their own content, such a
development could (among other things) help build a decentralized, open
store of product reviews which might in the long run prove disruptive to centralized review
repositories such as Amazon and epinions - just as the advent of personal blogging tools undermines the viability of weblog clusters such as kuro5hin.org.
Blogware has implemented Reviews and Review metadata in their tool. RVW was already supported as a MovableType plug-in, and through the Blam! publishing tool, which I've been using on Way.Nu for quite a while; but it's inclusion in the "standard load" or Blogware should help speed the growth of the standard.
The RVW specification is a module extension to the RSS 2.0 syndication format. RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS
feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from
distributed sources. In other words, you can write book, restaurant,
movie, product, etc. reviews inside your own website, while allowing
them to be used by Amazon or other review aggregators.
There should be more than enough RVW metadata
out there floating around at this point. The next step is for someone
to build a decent aggregator that collating reviews of a particular
topic or two. Because of RVS, creating aggregate rating scores and
summarizing opinions should be very straightforward. It's really not
in the best interests of Amazon, epinions and the like to loose control
of their review content, but RVW makes controlling review content
impossible in the long term. Anyone got some pull at the Google
skunkworks?
Check out Accordion Guy
for a detailed walkthrough. I think most people, however
well-intentioned, won't have the patience to fill up all the fields by
themselves, so I presume the obvious next step would be to enable many
of the input fields to be filled automatically by using metadatabase
queries. (See the part about Musicbrainz in "Towards structured
blogging", and check out how blam gets by with as little as one ISBN number.)
Extrapolating from there, here's what things might look like a few
years from now: Blogging tools have become more general in terms of
what they produce. Basically they've become a personal publishing
interface onto which users can choose to hook a variety of structured
item types. A diversity of item types has sprung up; the most popular
ones are included by default with weblog tools. Lifting item types from
someone else's blog is trivial; creating new ones is only slightly
harder.
Third-party harvesters (Technorati next-gen?) scurry around and compete
with one another to provide meaningful views of the data. In the case
of item types that describe reviews, overall average ratings on any
particular product are easy to look up. However, if you choose to
provide a description of your personal web of trust to those
interfaces (think of blogrolls as a proto-example), you can efficiently
get a sense of what your tribe of
like-minded individuals thinks of that product. It's the
microblogosphere idea again - look up Recommender systems and the microblogosphere for more.
Videos from last week's Zap your PRAM conference are beginning to trickle in. Dan James' talk about how Prince Edward Island-based web development shop Silverorange
operates was inspiring. These guys actually like their clients, and
their clients (including a branch of the NRC, by the way) actually like them. You'll understand why if you view the
video.
