Les Orchard is on a roll about building the Recipe Web, which is one of the promising directions for structured blogging. He underscores one of the critical obstacles to adoption:
I just read a post by Marc Canter
talking about the growing formats for reviews, where he asks why there
aren’t more fields to fill out for a properly constructed post. He
acknowledges that end-users might not want to fill those out, but we
need that data to be potentially available -- but my take on it is that
end-users won’t ever want to fill out any fields that they don’t have to. And, if there are too many fields that they do have to fill out, they’ll never do it.
Well put. Accessible metadatabases such as Musicbrainz or Amazon can help here. Notice how blam!
asks for a single number to identify the item you're writing about,
then automagically fills in a payload of metadata that gets put on blaxm.
In his piece, Les discusses one way to overcome the filling-out-of-forms issue in his particular context.
David Buchanexplains how to make your feed better if you are unwilling to include full posts.
Continuing the call for full text feeds,
if you don't wish to do so, please create quality excerpts rather than
something automatically created by your blogging system. This will help
readers understand what you are speaking about quicker.
The principle of heads, decks, and leads is a cornerstone of
journalism. I don't consider myself a journalist, really, and wasn't
trained as such, so I've come around to an appreciation of this
principle more from an information engineering perspective. In
engineering terms, we think about optimal allocation of resources. The
resource of interest here is one of the most precious there is: human
attention. Newspapers and magazines structure themselves using heads,
decks, and leads because they know that human attention is a finite
resource, and must be conserved.
ibiblio "gives Web space to those who can't host their own sites due to political or financial considerations" (via Wired via Open Access News). I think the Internet Archive has a similar offering.
